


The Thief

by sionnach_glic



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-19
Updated: 2017-10-04
Packaged: 2018-12-17 05:10:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 54,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11844603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sionnach_glic/pseuds/sionnach_glic
Summary: “I’m afraid of things,” she says, as if trying to convince herself, trying to sound confident, but instead her voice betrays her. She's uncertain about what those things are.He snorts. “Liar.” She’s the most fearless person he’s ever met, fearless to the point of stubborn stupidity.“I am,” she insists.“Of what then?”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Arya-centric with multiple POVs. I wanted to explore two things: How do characters confront grief when they're not running for their lives and what makes them truly terrified?
> 
> Follows the novels, but don’t worry TV fans, I’ve thrown in some references to the series for grins (sans Season 7 spoilers).
> 
> The places and characters are not mine, but come from the brilliant twisted mind of GRRM.

Her furs are soaked through from the sleet when she finds the Inn.

The ironwood door groans as she heaves it open, warmth hitting her face, stomping the slush from her boots.

From some dark corner she hears the drawl of a summer islander griping about the cold and she hastily pulls the door shut against the wind, pushing back the hood of her furs.

She’s pulling at the fingers of her gloves as the scent of a brown stew – rabbit, she thinks – hits her nose and her stomach clenches painfully in reply.

She takes a seat near the door, scanning the room, evaluating her companions for the night as she dimly recalls she’s been here before . . . before the sea, before the Kindly Man, before she was no one.

Four lonely candles light the tavern hall, but it’s enough to appraise the men, five of them, all thieves she’d wager, and an elderly barkeep with a girl, younger than her, dressed in tattered silks.

“Do you have any rooms?” She asks the keep when he approaches the table.

His eyes are hooded beneath grey squirrelly brows, suspicious and his mouth set in a tight line. “You got coin?”

She grows an innocent smile, placing two coins on the table and then the tight line softens to a friendly smile. He nods.

“A room then,” she says, placing another coin on the table, “and an ale with stew.”

While the man fetches the stew she draws her fingers through her hair, twisting the strands to wring out the moisture, catching the scent of herself. She desperately needs a bath.

One of the men is staring at her hungrily and it is then she remembers this place.

She killed someone here once.

A deep voice at the end of the tavern draws her attention and her brows pull in, curious, because she knows that voice from somewhere. It takes a moment to remember, but then it comes, her brows climbing her face in surprise.

There, barking at the keep for another ale, is a boy she once knew, only now he’s a man, tall and dark, and with a face that’s grown grim.

***

They embrace one another so fiercely she’s sure he’s broken one of her ribs.

“I’ve missed you,” they say together and she laughs with the man, but inside her chest aches for her brother, Jon Snow.

Over brown ales they share the fonder memories from their travels together and for a moment there isn’t a war and they aren’t orphans and life feels simpler somehow.

When the sleet turns to snow two days later she exchanges help in the kitchens for a room at the Inn and for the next fortnight she begins to teach him how to read.

_All men must serve._

She doesn’t answer when he asks her one night about the Hound or where she has been since they parted nor does he tell her what happened with the Brotherhood when she asks, but somehow these secrets between them don't seem to matter.

The nightmares return, finding her, reminding her. In this one she is still holding the flowers she had picked for him in the Neck, but when she hands them to him he frowns as his throat opens up and the flowers wilt, crimson rivers flowing between her fingers, staining the tips.

She rises then, knowing sleep will not come, and pads down the hall to his room.

He’s awake when she knocks and as she stands, arms crossed, in front of the windowpane, staring at the moon, she can feel him watching her from the bed.

They are quiet for a long while, but then, while he cannot see her face and for reasons she doesn’t understand, she begins to tell him of the day she watched her father die and how he came to be betrayed.

Her voice is empty like the chasm inside her.

She doesn’t know why she tells him and that . . . that unnerves her. Is it because she’s in the Riverlands where she’d once been with her father, with Mycah, when she’d said goodbye to Nymeria? Is it because he’s reminded her of their time with Yoren and thinking of the Night’s watchman always leads her mind back to that day at the Sept?

But another voice needles at her mind, telling her the truth of it.

_He’s the only one left who knows the person you became after the day your father died._

She wonders if he is sleeping, he is so silent when she finishes her tale, but then she hears the bed creak as he rises from the mattress, whispering a raspy, “I know.”

She turns to look at him. “How—”

“Yoren told me.”

The moon is high and she can see his reflection in the window as he comes to stand behind her, resting his hands on her shoulders.

“I came after you,” he tells her and she knows he means the night she ran.

 _I was gone,_ she thinks, _I was No One._

“I know,” she whispers back instead.

“You can sleep here tonight,” he finally murmurs as his fingers squeeze her shoulder.

He knows. He knows why she came here, but he says no more as he leans against the window and they listen to the rain melting the snow.

She knows to stay is unwise, that it invites rumor and whispers, but she stays all the same because she doesn’t want to be alone with her nightmares anymore.

Sleep finally comes for her as he takes the floor and she takes the bed, listening to the steady rhythm of his breathing.

That night she lifts her head back and howls and in a cold distant place she hears another answer her call. Her pulse quickens, the howl deep and mournful, full of longing, and it reminds her of the choked sound her grey brother made once so many long years ago. She wants to run to the other, but she can’t. Something is keeping her here, keeping her south, south of the rancid stagnant waters filled with the dark monsters that have bulging eyes.

She cannot cross.

Not yet.

When she wakes hours later, her body still heavy with sleep and his blue eyes on hers, piercing her straight to her marrow, he asks her if she still has her list.

When the rains stop they go north to the Twins.

***

At Fairmarket while searching for Gendry’s men, the men who abandoned the Brotherhood with him, she finds what’s become of her mother. She rushes to embrace her and it’s only when Gendry’s hands grasp her arms tightly from behind that she realizes this thing with empty eyes is no longer her mother.

This thing is a ghost that does not even recognize her and she wonders if she has succeeded then, if she became no one after all.

She gives her mother the Gift.

They build a wooden craft in the Tully custom, placing her mother’s corpse inside but the river is frozen and she burns on the ice until it melts as Arya stands on the banks, troubled for her mother’s soul, watching the pyre sink straight down to the river bottom like stone. 

After, alone, she sobs silently on the banks of the Trident until her cheeks are dry, but then they are wet again and something rough and coarse is being dragged across their surface.

_Nymeria._

She buries her face in the direwolf’s furs and the reunion makes the pain of losing her mother twice sting just a little less.

When they return to camp, two she-wolves, fierce and unyielding, she glares at what remains of the brotherhood, cravens the lot of them.

She gives them a choice.

The Brotherhood joins them.

***

They reach the Twins a fortnight later, Gendry’s men and the Brotherhood with them, and she sees him move in battle for the first time since they parted. He is bold and fierce, moving in full plate and swinging a warhammer with a speed she hardly finds possible.

Walder Frey is asleep in his bedchamber. She straddles him, a dagger to his throat, and when he awakens, she leans down, so close the stubble of his beard scratches her cheek.

 _House Stark sends their regards_ , she tells him,as she drags the blade across the thin, wrinkled skin of the old man’s throat and as he bleeds out, the life leaving his eyes, she whispers, _for Robb_. 

Gendry finds her rooted there, still straddling the corpse, hours later and he takes her by the hand, leading her away to an abandoned bedchamber.

In silence she works the ties of his armor with her fingers as her eyes watch the muscles of his back work to lift off each piece and when they are both down their breeches, his chest bare, her in a tunic, the intimacy of what they are doing, this post-battle ritual, hits her.

She reaches her arms around him from behind, resting her forehead on his back, breathing him in, grateful for him, for this, that he is still here.

She wants to know what his lips feel like on her skin, but this is not the time or the place and so she settles for tracing her fingers across his arms, his back, his chest . . . and when he turns, wrapping her in his arms, kissing her hair, she forgets for a moment that this place is where her family was slaugthered.

They take their sleeping skins outside with the others because she doesn’t want to spend another moment inside the castle where they died, but sleep won’t find her here, she knows and she tosses until she feels his thumb brush against the back of her hand.

She turns, his eyes watching her as she watches him and then something unwraps inside her. Something new and terrifying and it frightens her, this way he makes her feel, her body humming, alive, like she is _someone_ again.

The snows will be deep further north. When the sun rises they take the Freys’ garrons just in case.

***

They spend weeks crossing the dozens of shallow flat streams that meander across the Neck, each channel an ever changing braid, one overlapping the next, constantly shifting from day to day, reminding her of her sister’s hair.

She thinks they are lost.

She wonders how the crannogmen keep track of their secret roads through the bogs and streams that hug sand bars and mud-stained trunks of great big cypresses and willows with hanging moss so long it skims the water’s surface.

She thinks of Mycah then and their journey south all those years ago, how he had grabbed a chunk of the moss in his hands and sprinkled it over her head with his fingers, giggling as tiny pale spiders jumped out.

She plays that same trick now, reaching for a willow branch from her garron, pulling off some of the moss and passing it to Gendry, telling him it’s soft as silk as he takes it from her hands.

She almost pisses herself from laughter when he spots the tiny beady-eyed spiders crawling inside it and shrieks like a girl, thrusting the moss into the waters, frantically brushing his hands like a madman. For the remainder of the day, when he thinks she isn’t looking, she spies him checking his clothes and shaking out his hair.

That night he’s so angry with her he lays his sleeping skin next to Thoros, but she moves hers next to his anyway and while the others sleep he rolls over to look at her, his eyes serious.

“Listen,” he whispers.

She does, closing her eyes so she can open her ears deeper to the sounds of the Neck . . . the chirping crickets and barking frogs, the willows singing on a slow gentle wind, the waters lapping against tree bark . . .

She opens her eyes. “What am I listening for?” she asks in a whisper.

“ _Nothing_ ,” he whispers back sardonically as he scratches the beard he started growing back in Fairmarket. “Because there is _nothing_ alive in here.”

 Even though she knows he can’t see her in the dark, she rolls her eyes.

“Don’t be stupid. Just look at the trees,” she says, motioning with her hands to the landscape around them. “People live here too.”

“ _People_ live here?” he says horrified, glancing around the bog, as if expecting to find evidence of them. “Where? We’ve seen nothing and no one for weeks.”

 _And you won’t,_ she thinks, but she had _felt_ them watching.

“Close you eyes,” she murmurs, “and listen again.”

When he opens his eyes again a moment later she thinks she hears a smile when he whispers, “Frogs.”

She nods with a smile of her own. A silence grows between them, the moonlight catching the blue in his eyes, his gaze piercing her and a shiver descending down her spine, curling around some space inside her, deep and low in her belly.

Her eyes squint to scan his face better, traveling to his mouth and she wants to know what his lips would feel like against hers, on her skin, on her neck, but she can’t kiss him, not here, with their men all around them.

So she settles.

With careful fingers, she reaches across their bodies, brushing the tips softly against his jaw and discovers the hair of his beard is thick and coarse, but the skin beneath is warm and familiar.

She can feel the muscles of his jaw tick beneath her fingertips when his mouth turns up into a questioning lopsided grin and that feeling he stirs inside her grows, making her skin pulse to life.

She pulls her hand away, his eyes still on hers, silently asking what that was all about.

She shrugs as she makes her face a mask. “Thought I saw a spider,” she lies.

His hands dart to his beard, brushing furiously. He checks his body for spiders for so many minutes afterward that she has to bury her laughter in her sleeping skin.

In the dark he hisses, “This is not _funny!_ ” and he couldn’t be more serious which only makes her laugh harder.

This laughter – roaring, uncontrollable gasping laughter – feels strange on her tongue, as if she’d forgotten not just the means to making it, but it’s very sound and only now is she finally beginning to remember.

Thoros is on watch tonight and hisses at them over his shoulder to keep it down.

“Go to sleep, Gendry,” she finally breathes as her laughter dies away, but that night she doesn’t sleep at all because she can’t stopping thinking about him and that beard and how she wants his mouth on hers.

***

They meet a stranger on the Kingsroad while stuck in a squall at the north end of the Neck and she exchanges glances with Gendry, uncertain.

He’s scratching that beard that she'd told him makes him look ridiculous, but when she’d said it he had only grinned stupidly because they both knew what she really meant was that it makes him look _handsome_.

The stranger is no one she knows, but judging by his stature he must be a crannogman and when he pulls her aside, telling her he was her father’s man, he confirms with urgency that the whispers they’ve heard on the road aren’t whispers at all.

The Others aren’t a nursemaid’s tale. They are returned.

She isn’t prepared for what Howland Reed tells her next.

Robb named her heir and Jon Snow is _alive_.

But he isn’t Jon Snow and he isn’t her brother, he never was, and he knows none of this.

And all that matters now is getting back to him.

Howland Reed leads them through the Neck to the coast where he finds them a ship to take them to White Harbor. Before they part ways he gives her the bones of her father, thrusting two parchments into her hands and presenting her with a package wrapped in the hides of an animal she does not recognize.

Nestled inside are contents that cause her eyebrows to pull up.

These are no ordinary bows, she knows, because they aren’t made of wood, but instead gleam black in the fading sunlight and her breath hitches, her fingers tracing bone she has seen only once before, in the bowels of the Red Keep.

She snaps her eyes to Howland’s, leaving the question unspoken, but he knows it anyway somehow and answers, _there were bones at the Tower of Joy_.

He leans his face down next to her ear, his beard scratching her skin, to share one final secret.

“The cold winds are rising,” he whispers, his breath hot on her ear, “Jon must find the dragon,” he pauses, his eyes growing sad and then his next words send a chill down her spine, “but only _you_ can use its ichor.”

She remains quite still, bile rising in her throat, as these words sink in.

A memory of the House of Black and White comes then, of the sacrifices she had had to make, what she had to do to come back here . . .

She steps away from the man, as she opens her mouth to tell him she can’t go back, not ever, but she shuts it when his lips turn up in a sly smile that makes his eyes twinkle.

“Not Braavos, princess,” he says, glancing at Gendry at the edge of the dock, “the smith will know where.”

“I cannot return to Essos,” she tells him, shaking her head.

He grips her shoulders firmly, his eyes commanding. “You will when the time comes,” he replies, “it is the only way we win.”

“But the dragons—”

His eyes, solemn and sad, are what cut her off. He shakes his head.

He squeezes her shoulder and then embraces her.

“I loved your father. You will love my daughter even more. When you go for Bran,” he whispers, “keep Nymeria close.”

He pulls away, slipping back into the marsh as she stands there alone, bewildered, for moments after, unsure if she heard him right.

_Bran._

On the ship she shares a cabin with Gendry despite Harwin’s protests, only they do not touch and they hardly sleep because the seas are violent and Gendry’s too distracted with throwing up.

She would laugh if he didn’t look so miserable. Instead she fetches him water, and throws his sick overboard, distracting him with the story of the Tower of Joy, but, like her father did before her when she first heard him tell it, she leaves out the part about Jon Snow.

***

She’s been in Westeros for seven moons when she finally sees Winterfell again and her heart sinks at the sight, the walls an open wound, burned and broken, bleeding snow.

How will they survive winter in a ruin?

Nymeria howls, bounding with excitement through the snows like she’s still a pup, but she’s not running in the direction of the castle. She is making for the Wolfswood. Arya calls to her, but her wolf is stubborn, like her, and so she chases the wolf with her garron, afraid to lose sight of the friend she has only just had returned to her.

It is then she sees a blur of muscle and fur dart out of the wood.

_Ghost._

_Jon is here._

She turns her horse to the castle, urging her into a gallop toward the gates and the mare she rides is all too willing to oblige when Ghost sends up a howl that rumbles in her chest. She hears Gendry calling after her in the distance, but ignores him, pressing the horse to a full sprint.

The guards don’t believe she is whom she says she is until Nymeria and Ghost arrive at her side, baring their teeth, growling.

But none of that matters when she sees him, jumping up on to the battlements in haste, searching for her, and when his eyes lock on hers he yells for the gates to open.

She leaps from her horse, running now, running faster than she ran from the Hound at the Twins, and then she’s there, falling to her knees, as he does the same and she doesn’t think she’s ever held on to another so tightly.

Her cheeks are moist and she realizes she is weeping, no _laughing_ , and the sound of his laughter is something she thought she had lost, but now realizes she’s never forgotten. Winterfell is a ruin, but Jon Snow is her home and he’s the only one that’s ever mattered.

His voice is thick when he murmurs into her hair, _how I’ve missed you, little sister._

The words crash down on her, raking her skin like the sand in a violent cold wave.

And she remembers then that it is this man whose heart she has been tasked to break.

***

Grief finally finds her in a foreign bedchamber in the Guest House. She takes a room there to escape the pale specters that haunt the corners of her old chambers, but even the fire stoking in the hearth can’t keep the dead away and she knows comfort is not something she’ll find here.

She recognizes no one. Not Sansa, not Jon, not even herself. There are only strange faces in this place now; the familiar ones all gone.

Here, in her _home_ , their absence is more acute, stinging her like a stab to the gut, like she’s losing them all over again.

Part of her, she realizes, half expected to burst through the gates of Winterfell and find them all still there, safe and wondering where she had been. Her mother would be waiting at the gate, ready to reprimand her for her dirty face and leather breeches and her father would be standing beside her, mirth in his smile.

But instead Winterfell is her lichyard and all she finds here are ghosts.

They live on the tree limbs Bran use to climb and in the abandoned toys Rickon once played with. They are in Sansa’s auburn hair and Jon’s grey grim eyes. She smells them in the fires her father would sit by each night and on the garments in her wardrobe, the one’s her mother had made her that she had complained about hating so much.

They sit beside her in the Great Hall, in vacant chairs, as hollow as the spaces their absence has left behind inside her.

When she searches her mind then for her father’s smile, her panic rising as she realizes she can no longer recall it, the first strangled sob seeps out from her chest.

And although this despair of losing her father’s face is giving her anguish, her mind won’t release it. Instead, it greedily latches on to it, meandering back to it, again and again and again, like some cold dark thing, clenching her heart, slowly devouring her, and squeezing all the air from her chest.

So she weeps.

It is not the soft cry of a babe or the quiet tears she muffled into her pillow as a child so Sansa wouldn’t hear. These are rapid and fierce sobs that leave her _gasping_. Her hands fly to her mouth, as if to catch them and force them back inside, but she is hemorrhaging these howls from some abyss in her marrow and she can’t find the means to make them stop.

A wolf’s howl rises in the night, and then another, joining her own and she quiets for a moment as she listens to them call, searching _, hoping,_ waiting for a reply. Only she knows none will come and when their howls deepen into something else, something haunting that rattles her bones and aches in her throat, she knows they know it too.

The howls remind her of drums, of burning men, of Greywind, of Robb.

In a fury she grabs a dagger. She stabs the bed pillows, heaving a washing basin and smashing it against the door, tearing the tapestries from the walls, and then she falls to her knees, exhausted, wanting nothing more than to scream.

So she does.

She does not care who hears. She wants them all to hear what they have done to her home, to her family – to _her_. And there, in the middle of the floor, with her hands on her head, fisting her hair, she fears she will suffocate under the weight of this sorrow and the crazed rage it brings.

When Jon bursts into her chambers shortly after, she is ashamed, but he doesn’t say a word, moving in silence, as he wraps his arms around her, cupping her head to his chest, because he knows. He _knows_ what is happening here.

It is only the quaking of his chest beneath her that tells her he is crying too.

“I want them back to, little sister.”

_Little sister._

But, she isn't. Not anymore. She never was and in a way, she’s even lost him. It only makes her sob more.

Then Sansa is there, wrapping her arms around them both, and with the three of them together, sharing this grief, feeling their sorrow together, the burden of loss feels just a little bit lighter.

 _This is my pack,_ she reminds herself, _I still have one, and here it is._

When their sobs have died and the room has grown quiet, Sansa finally asks, horrified, “What did you do to this room?”

Arya lets the smile begging at the corner of her lips grow into a chuckle and laughter still feels odd in her mouth, but she can’t be bothered to care because her pack is here, laughing beside her.

The sky is only beginning to lighten when a wet tongue wakes her, tickling her cheek, and she turns to find Ghost silently staring at her. She musses his scruff, hugging him tightly as her eyes travel the room, discovering the mess she has made of it.

Shame starts to heat her cheeks, but it vanishes when she spots Nymeria strewn protectively on the floor next to a sleeping Sansa.

She searches for Jon, finding him seated in a large chair in the corner, his eyes still, alert, and watching her, _concerned_.

It is then she remembers, with sorrow, the truth she has yet to give him as a call goes up from outside.

 _Rider!_ She hears a guard call and in his voice she hears the edge of unease.

She understands why when next he says, _North gate!_

She shares an anxious glance with Jon. She can’t imagine riding through the night in these temperatures.

_Dark wings, dark words._

Then he stands, glancing out the window before rushing from her chambers without a word.

When she arrives at the gate moments later there is a woman atop a frothing horse, unconscious and slumping in her saddle, but relief floods Arya because she hadn’t been sure. She didn’t want to believe him, but now she knows. 

“Meera,” she breathes with a smile as Jon turns to her.

Bran is alive. She doesn’t know how, but she knows. 

And this is the woman who is going to take her to him.

***

He’s been awake for hours, restless, unable to sleep, because he can’t get her out of his mind.

They’ve been in Winterfell nearly a fortnight, but since they arrived he has only seen brief glimpses of her and with a muffled groan he admits that it’s her absence next to him when he falls into bed each night that has his sleep so troubled.

He shouldn’t have these feelings, not for _her_ , not for a lady, but somewhere in the Neck, with her body next to his, watching her sleep, he’d decided he’d go mad if he denied it any longer.

He’s falling for Arya Stark.

His desire had only grown with the confession, raging inside him, growing more furious with each passing day, unsatisfied and snarling like some untamed beast.

Tom is in the cot next to him, snoring and grunting, reminding him that he’s not alone as he pinches his eyes shut, desperate to quell the tightness growing in his groin and the frustration clouding his mind.

He drags his body from the bed, reaching for his breeches and he's tying the laces as a knock comes softly on the door. He’s hastily pulling on a tunic as he opens it, surprised when he finds her on the other side of it.

He can’t imagine what she’s thinking, showing up here at dawn, and he’s about to tell her all the million ways this isn’t proper, but the words die in his throat as she pauses in the doorway, leaning a shoulder against the frame, staring up at him, a soft smile on her mouth.

He swallows.

Her hair is plaited in some northern style, cascading down her shoulders in chestnut-hued waves, and the fact she’s wearing a dress, grey and cuffed with white fur, throws him for a moment until he remembers why and frowns.

She's burying her father’s bones with the ancestors of House Stark in the Winterfell crypt today.

In another life he would have snickered at the dress and that hair, but now he can only gulp at the sight of her.

She is breathtaking.

And he is doomed, he is sure of it, as his heart hammers away inside his chest.

She places her hand on his shoulder, pushing him backward into the room and stepping inside as her eyes light up with something.

As he crosses his arms, his lips tighten into a line. He knows that look.

It’s the one she wore that night she showed up in his bunk in Harrenhal asking for a sword. It’s the one she wears when she means to recruit him for some purpose that’s sure to get them both in trouble.

She hands him a dagger, oily and dark as night, asking him if he knows what it is, as she glances at Tom. He’s mumbling some grievance about being woken, naked as his nameday, not caring in the slightest that a Lady of the house is in his bedchamber.

Gendry fishes on the floor for a pair of breeches and tosses them forcefully at Tom’s face, as Arya gives him a withering look.

He ignores that as he holds the dagger up in the growing daylight, weighing it between his palms, knowing already that it’s too lightweight to be iron-forged.

He pinches the blade’s edge between his fingers to inspect its thickness, and notices the flat of it is unbalanced, rough and pocked and he knows then what it is because it’s been hand carved.

He’s worked with this before and glances at her, wondering where in the world she got it, wondering if this is another secret Arya Stark will keep from him because she has so many now and the biggest one, he knows, is how she came to be lethal.

She’s saying something to Lem about House Stark burial rites as he passes his palm along the surface of the blade, expecting it to be dull, but it slices open his skin instead.

He’s muttering a curse under his breath and sucking the blood from his palm as she turns back, glancing at his hand, shaking her head, fighting a grin.

He tightens his jaw. “Well you didn’t warn me it was sharp.” It’s too early for this.

She raises an eyebrow. “It’s a _blade_ , Gendry,” she says, rolling her eyes, reaching for his palm, “let me see.”

Over her shoulder, he locks eyes with Lem who gives him a disapproving look as he tosses Tom his tunic. They both know it’s not proper for Arya to be in this room right now, but neither he nor Lem or Tom are willing to risk her wrath by telling her so.

She must read his mind because she glances over her shoulder to tell them that there are rashers of bacon in the Hall.

Lem is gawking at him angrily, a warning in his eyes, because it’s even more improper for her to be left alone in this room with _just_ him, but Gendry can only shrug, his eyes saying, _do you want to be the one to tell her no?_

 _Better me than Tom,_ he wants to say, but as he glances at Arya, his groin aching, he isn’t sure that’s true.

Lem is shaking his head, as his mouth opens, apparently finding some courage, but then Tom is dragging him toward the door, mumbling something about Thoros.

She moves to close the door as he wraps his fingers around her elbow, pulling her back.

“You shouldn’t be here as it is," he tells her, "Leave it.”

She rolls her eyes. “Jon knows I’m here. Relax,” she tells him, as if that's supposed to somehow make him feel better. She slides her arm free and closes the door.

She takes his injured hand again and he watches as she pushes back a strand of hair, the one that always seems to fall in her eyes, a small grin growing on his mouth when it falls free again seconds later.

His fingers reach out, tucking it back behind her ear, lingering, following the strand to its end and when she glances up at him, her cheeks flushed, his breeches grow tighter than a vice as the muscles low on his abdomen pull in.

Her eyes return to his hand, oblivious to the effect she has on him, and her fingers are deft and careful as they spread his palm flat. He tries to focus on the dagger, telling her the blade is made of obsidian, handing it back to her, and asking her where she got it.

“Jon,” she tells him quietly as she moves to tear a piece of cloth from her dress with it to wrap his hand.

He stays her fingers with his uninjured ones and looks at her.

“Don’t ruin your dress,” he says.

“It’s just a dress,” she replies.

He steps closer. “ _I know,_ ” he murmurs, brushing her hair behind her ear again, words coming out of his mouth before he can stop them, “but I like you in it.”

She hesitates and he’s not sure if it’s those creased eyebrows or the way she bites her lip to keep control of her smile that causes the pain radiating from his palm to die, but it does.

Gods he wants to kiss her, lowborn birth be damned. He’s wanted to kiss her for months, but like so many other moments, this isn’t the time or the place and she isn’t for him.

He clears his throat and asks her to rip his tunic instead.

He watches her as she wraps his hand, trying to ignore how close her body is to his, and when she asks him if dragonglass can be forged into swords, he struggles to form words into sentences.

“No,” he tells her, looking at the blade where she's placed it on a table, “it’s too brittle, it serves better as spears or arrows.”

She’s finished bandaging his hand, but still holding his palm as she nods almost absently, her eyes distant and that’s his first hint something is wrong.

He asks her what this is all about and when she says _them_ , he takes her hand, knowing she means the Others.

He’d wanted to snort when she’d told him one morning in the Neck what Howland Reed had said.

_The Others? Real?_

But her voice had been passive and measured, the way it is whenever she wants others to think she isn’t afraid.

Her eyes had betrayed her fear that morning, as he grabbed her chin, forcing her gaze to meet his, searching it and finding something there that he hadn't seen since Harrenhal, something that made his blood run cold. _Dread._

And that’s what he’s seeing again now as he looks at her.

“Arya—”

“Jon says it’s true,” she says in a whisper. “He was afraid, Gendry, when he talked about _them_.”

She's rarely said their name since that first day in the Neck and that’s how he knows she's frightened, but then so is everyone else. The difference between Arya and them, he knows, is that she fears little else.

He crosses his arms, shrugging. “Every man is afraid of something. Jon may be your brother, but he’s still just a man—”

She cuts him with a look that makes him eat the rest of his words.

 _Is he?_ Those grey eyes are asking as his mind turns then to Beric.

“What my mother became at the end . . .” she says slowly, “would you call that a woman?”

His mind flashes to the Lady. He can’t say what her brother is now, but he hopes he never becomes _that_.

He sighs, frowning.

“That was different,” he tells her. “Your brother is _different_. He still remembers you. He’s still afraid of something. Your mother wasn’t afraid of anything at the end. _”_

She appraises him, eyes thoughtful. “What are you afraid of?” she asks him.

 _You,_ he almost tells her.

But she smirks before he can answer, amused by some jest he knows is forthcoming.

“Spiders, for sure,” she quips, laughing.

He glowers, rolling his eyes, remembering that stunt she pulled in the Neck.

“And what are you afraid of? I thought dresses and braids, but . . . ” He nods at her attire, raising his eyebrows.

 _That_ sobers the smile off her face as he bites back a smug grin.

“I’m afraid of things,” she says, as if trying to convince herself, trying to sound confident, but instead her voice betrays her. She's uncertain about what those things are.

He snorts. “Liar.” She’s the most fearless person he’s ever met, fearless to the point of stubborn stupidity.

“I am,” she insists.

“Of what then?”

For a breath she is quiet and staring at the dragonglass dagger. “Of losing them again,” she says, shifting her eyes to his, something flashing in her eyes, “of _you_ ,” before she hastily adds, “of losing you too.”

He stares at her, unblinking for a moment, jolted by the knowledge that he could scare her as much as she scares him.

Her cheeks are crimson as she shifts her feet, biting her lower lip and he can’t remember the last time he saw Arya Stark flustered, but she is now, because of _him_ and because of _this_.

The discovery has him battling a grin.

He steps toward her. “Arya, I’m—” he starts.

“Don’t say it,” she warns, a finger pointed at his chest.

He straightens, his hands going to his hips, shaking his head. “You don’t even know what I was going to say.”

“Yes, I do. And don’t.”

He’s trying to stay serious, fighting a grin as he appraises her mockingly. “So _that’s_ what you were doing all those years, then,” he says, his smile roguish, “becoming a _seer_?”

She gives him a warning look. “Don’t jest.”

It had become a running joke between them, guessing what the other had been up to during those years they’d spent apart and he went along, willing to accept the not knowing if it meant she would never find out how he had helped Brienne of Tarth save Jaime Lannister from her mother.

But every now and then clues would come out, his curiosity building.

In White Harbor, as they’d strolled along the market, she’d stopped at a fishmonger to try oysters, explaining the different types to him, pointing to the ones that weren’t fresh and the ones that tasted best, as if she’d spent years fishing them herself.

 _Did you spend the last five years under the sea with the mermen?_ He’d asked her then, _Are you_ sure _you’re a wolf?_

 _Mermen aren’t real,_ she’d retorted with a laugh as her eyes grew serious and she added, _but dragons are._

In Fairmarket, Thoros had asked after the Hound and when she’d told him with indifference that he was dead, he had asked her who had killed him, her or no one. She’d bristled at that, her eyes flashing with something cold and deadly that slammed the red priest back in his chair.

And then in the Neck one evening, annoyed with Tom’s teasing and looking to piss him off, she’d told him that he was a terrible bard, that she’d met the _real_ Black Pearl, (whoever that was) and she was nothing like his stupid songs.

When Tom told him later that the Black Pearl was a courtesan, he’d wished he’d never asked, not liking where his thoughts had led him about Arya.

 _Were you doing what she was doing?_ He’d asked her angrily weeks later, finally finding the courage after having too much of Thoros rum. _Were you a courtesan?_

She’d slapped him across the face for that, telling him it was none of his business. _I’ll be the one deciding who I give my maidenhead to,_ she had hissed at him.

That had sent his mind reeling in an entirely _different_ direction . . .

And then there was the way she had moved in battle at the Twins . . . He’d never seen anything like it. There was a lethal beauty to it.

 _You were in Dorne,_ he’d teased her after _. The Sand Snakes taught you to fight like that._

Her words were clipped when she replied. _No one taught me how to fight like that._

Something about the way she had said it made him believe her. When they were children she’d had a sword, a small little blade, and she’d wielded it with clumsy fierceness, but now . . .

He glances at her.

Now she is a warrior.

She’s taller than she was then, but still diminutive next to his towering height, barely reaching his neck, and her hair is longer too, but as his gaze shifts down the length of her body, it’s _that dress_ , hugging the swell of her hips and the curve of her breasts that causes his gaze to linger longer than it should, reminding him that they aren’t children anymore.

He swallows, forcing his eyes back to hers, and when he looks at her, he remembers the greatest difference now lies in her eyes.

They were always unyielding, but now they are _hard_ and he wants to know what she’s had to wade through to make them that way, but she keeps that part of her locked away and hidden, even from him.

He takes a step toward her, but she stretches her arm in front of her, a warning hand extended.

“If you’re going to say some words about not dying I don’t want to hear them.” She gestures in the direction of the crypts. “They all said similar words, but words are wind and wind can’t keep you alive.”

“Those aren’t the words I was going to say,” he tells her softly, stepping closer.

Her eyes are curious. “What were you going to say then?”

He reaches for her hands, weaving his fingers through hers. “That I’m afraid of you too.”

Something flickers in her eyes as she shakes her head, whispering, “I don’t want you to be afraid of me.”

He glances at their entwined hands. “It’s too late for that.” _Much too late._

“Why do I scare you?” she asks in a quiet voice, worry creeping in.

“Why do I scare _you_?” He replies, brushing his thumbs against the back of her hands.

She hesitates. “I just told you _why_.”

He steps closer. “Tell me again.”

Irritation flares in her eyes. “ _Because_ , Gendry, I don’t want to lose anyone else I love.”

Her mouth forms into a small _oh_ , realizing what she’s said, her cheeks turning pink and she glances away, pulling her hands from his.

He pulls them back as she stares at the dragonglass dagger on the table as if it’s the most interesting thing in the world.

She’s chewing her bottom lip, something she only does whenever she’s nervous or thinking too hard, and he can’t help it.

He grins.

“Arya, look at me,” he says, and when she does he tells her, “that’s why you scare me too.”

Her brows scrunch. “Gendry—”

“I’ve missed you,” he tells her, before he can stop. “I’ve missed _this_.”

 _This_ he says, glancing at their entwined hands again, but he has no idea what _this_ even is. He only knows what it isn’t. _This_ isn’t friendship. _This_ isn’t safe. _This_ isn’t supposed to be for them – a bastard smith and a highborn girl.

 _This_ is the only damn thing keeping him alive.

She steps closer, and she’s close now, so close he can feel the words on his lips when she whispers, “so have I,” and then his chest swiftly grows too small for his beating heart.

He knows that they shouldn’t, that what they are about to do is reckless, that this is selfish, but she’s whispering his name against his lips and he knows that they are both beyond stopping now.

Then his mouth is on hers, slow at first, and hers is soft as he cups the side of her face.

Her fingertips are traveling up his chest and sliding around his neck, but it’s the fabric of her dress beneath his fingers at the small of her back, the smooth grey suede, that reminds him why he wasn’t going to kiss her today and he reluctantly breaks the kiss.

“Arya,” he breathes, pressing his forehead to hers.

“Please don’t say I’m a lady.”

He kisses her softly, smiling against her lips. “You’re a terrible seer, you know that?”

She places her fingertips to his lips. “Stop talking,” she murmurs, kissing him again.

The way she kisses him this time – teasing and _practiced,_ tugging his lower lip between her teeth while her fingers reach beneath his tunic, grazing the muscles of his back, making him shudder – has him realizing he isn’t the first man she’s ever kissed.

And some part of him needs those other men to be erased.

So he breaks the kiss to reset the pace and when he brushes his lips against hers again he kisses her _slow_ , his hand buried in her hair, the other on her hip, pulling her closer still, molding her to him. 

They are mapping each others mouths when she presses her body flush against his, and there’s no way she can’t feel his desire for her now as her fingertips graze his beard, but then she sighs into his mouth and the kiss deepens into something else, something beyond lust, something tender and palpable, and he knows then, he _knows_.

This feeling she ignites inside him is something he’ll fight to never lose.

When they finally break apart, breathing heavy, desire burning in his groin and searing into his chest, he slowly raises his eyes to meet hers.

Her lips are bruised and her cheeks flushed as the daylight coaxes colors from her eyes and all he can do is swallow because, _gods_ , he thinks, _she’s fucking beautiful_.

And he wants her to know so he tells her.

Her cheeks somehow turn even pinker as she chews her bottom lip, pressing her forehead to his, his arms circling her waist and he couldn’t stop himself if he tried.

His mouth finds hers once more.

He’s not sure how long they remain that way, kissing lazily, but when the sound of men beginning to spar in the yard pulls him back to reality, the consequences of what they’ve just done finally begins to trickle into his mind and he remembers that he’s doomed.

Their friendship has crossed some invisible line and where they go from here is something he doesn’t want to think about because it makes his chest ache, knowing he can never have her in the way that he wants.

She inhales against his chest.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she whispers and the words are warm against his neck.

“What?” His voice is hoarse.

“That we can’t have this.”

“ _I_ can’t have this,” his mouth says, but his body pulls her closer.

She peels her head off his shoulder, eyes serious.

“If you can’t have this, Gendry, then how can I?”

His jaw ticks. “You’re—”

“A lady, I know,” she starts, pausing when she registers his surprise, giving him a look, but then her mouth softens and her eyes are searching his as she says, “and _this_ lady chooses _you_.”

His smile is sad as he brushes his thumb across her cheek. “I don’t think your brother will agree with that choice.”

“Let me worry about Jon.”

Part of him wants to let her, to let her choose him, but a larger part cares for her too much to deprive her of a better life, a life deserving of a Stark.

He sighs. “I have nothing to offer you Arya. No lands. No titles.”

She rolls her eyes. “When have I ever cared about those things?”

“Never,” he admits, cupping her cheek. “But you might. When you have children.”

“Children . . .” she says slowly as if she’s forgotten they exist, but then something pained flashes in her eyes and she looks away, her next words quiet. “I can’t have them.”

Of all the things he expected her to say, this wasn’t one of them. “What?”

“I—” she hesitates, her eyes wincing and her mouth grimacing at some memory. “I was injured, while I was . . . away.”

Somewhere in there he hears a lie, but he lets it live because the look on her face tells him that the truth is something she’s not ready to discuss.

She glances at him, unsure. “Do . . . do you want that? Children?”

Did he? It isn't something he’s given much thought. All he knows is that he wants her.

“We can talk about this later,” he tells her softly. “You have more important things to think about today.”

She stiffens against him as a shadow passes over her face, one he’s seen there too many times before.

He traces her hairline with his fingers. “How are you?”

She replies with a curt “ _fine,”_ pulling from his arms, turning her back to him, walking to the window.

But he knows that none of this is fine and that _she_ is not fine.

He doesn’t follow her. Not yet. The fact she hasn’t stormed out yet is progress.

“Don’t do that,” he tells her.

“What?”

“Close yourself to me.”

She inhales deeply and shakes her head, turning to look at him, eyes apologetic. “We need him. _I_ need him. Only he isn’t here.” Her voice is thick and her eyes lost as she turns back to the window. “I don’t know how to fix this without him.”

She wipes her fingers across her cheek and he knows it’s to catch a tear. She hates crying in front of others, in front of _him_ , but he can’t keep his distance any longer and goes to her.

He places his hands on her shoulders and squeezes. “Fix what?”

She leans her back against his chest, but crosses her arms, not providing an answer.

So he offers options as his hands slide down her arms.

“Hot Pie’s wolf bread?”

He feels her chuckle softly against him and when she turns, a soft smile on her lips, warmth spreads across his chest because he’s the one who put it there.

There is a long pause. “ _Jon,”_ she finally says, “I don’t know how to fix Jon.”

Gendry isn’t sure what she means or why this is her responsibility, but he can guess.

This has to do with the part of her brother that is like Beric now.

“I don’t think even your father would know how to fix that,”he tells her honestly.

She looks at him then, brows creased and mouth sad. “No,” she says quietly, “he would, he is the only one who would.”

He wants to take this from her, but he knows he can’t so instead he simply holds her, breathing in the scent of her, trying to memorize it; once she leaves he doesn’t know if he’ll ever have her in his arms like this again.

“I should go,” she tells him when they hear movement coming from the room next to his and she moves to leave, but he pulls her back gently to kiss her one last time.

Then she’s untangling herself from his arms, grabbing the dragonglass dagger and pointing it at his bandaged hand, saying, “you will see the maester about that hand, Gendry Waters.”

As he leans against the window, watching her cross the practice yard, he wonders how long it will be this time before he sees her in a dress again, but his amusement quickly wanes into unease.

Unease about the Others, unease about these feelings she stirs in him that he shouldn’t have, _unease_ because, _fuck_ , he’s in love with a northern princess named Arya Stark.

But those thoughts evaporate as two riders burst into the yard, nearly knocking Arya off her feet.

He straightens, blinking, as something twists inside him.

It’s _Brienne of Tarth a_ nd beside her, on a dying horse, is Sandor-fucking-Clegane.

Then he’s out the door; hammer in hand, headed for the yard.


	2. Chapter 2

Somewhere in the darkness she hears the slow and steady _drip, drip, drip_ of running water as a stranger stares down at her, flames casting shadows off damp granite walls.

She studies the stranger’s face, the sculpted direwolf at his feet, the freshly forged iron sword lain across open palms . . .

It looks nothing like him.

Her mind tries to recall the last time she saw him then, and his face is hazy, unrecognizable, but the rest of the scene is sharp; the summer sky, blue and cloudless, her sister dressed in the finest silks, screaming for mercy, Ice beginning to sing in Ser Ilyn’s raised arms . . .

She shakes her head, a fool’s attempt to bury the memory, gripping the torch in her hands so tightly her knuckles turn white.

They laid her father’s bones to rest in the crypt at dusk, but the sun has long since set, everyone else gone, returned to the surface, everyone, but her and Jon Snow.

They stand in silence, two sentries holding a solemn watch, but as she glances at him, his eyes fixed on the hall that leads to the Kings of Winter, she suspects their reasons for lingering here are not one in the same.

An uneasy feeling settles in her belly as words Beric Dondarrion spoke to her once, long ago, bubble forward in her mind and she wonders if being here has him remembering his own death.

 _It all fades_.

She tries to shake that from her head too as she shifts her eyes to the statue on her father’s right.

 _Lyanna_.

She can’t help feeling ambivalent towards this aunt she never knew and whose actions, in so many ways, have led them all here.

 _Did she love him?_ She wonders and it’s not until Jon turns to her with curious brows that she realizes she’s asked the question aloud.

“Love who?”

She doesn’t look at him when she answers, guilt burning in her lungs, as she says a name, the name of a father he will never know.

“Rhaegar.”

She thinks the truth lies in one of the parchments Howland gave her, but only one of them was for her eyes and it isn’t the one with the answers.

Jon’s answer is quiet. “I think so.”

She shifts her eyes to his, but he’s turned his attention back to the deeper recesses of the crypts.

 _What haunts you Jon Snow?_ She wants to ask, but Beric’s words are stopping her.

So instead she says, “Why do you think that?”

He stares at her for a moment with grey eyes as still as the pool in the godswood, before they shift to Lyanna’s tomb.

“Has anyone told you why my brothers betrayed me?”

They had. “You planned to ride south for Ramsay,” she replies.

His gaze moves to the iron stranger, the man he still thinks is his father, as she watches the muscles in his jaw work.

“Aye. _‘I want my bride back’_ the letter said,” he tells her, the fingers on his right hand closing into a fist. There is a long pause as his eyes shift back to hers, “I thought the bride was you.”

She doesn’t understand what this has to do with Rhaegar and Lyanna, but then he tells her as his gaze returns to Lyanna's statue. “Love makes people do strange things, Arya.”

All of her words are lost in a bitter mixture of guilt, because she still hasn’t told him that they don’t share a father, and surprise, because she’s partly responsible for his dance with the Red God.

She turns to him then. “What did the Red God take from you, Jon?”

He tenses. “How—”

“That doesn’t matter just now. Tell me what he took.”

He exhales, shaking his head. “It’s done, Arya. What does it matter?”

His apathy unnerves her, so she moves to stand in front of him, but his eyes are glazed and distant and looking _through_ her.

She has seen that gaze only twice before, but never on him and something twists in her stomach as she remembers her mother at the end.

She extinguishes the torch in a water pail and grips his hands fiercely, as if that will somehow keep him here, rooted in this world, the one with the living.

“Stay _here_ , Jon.”

He looks away when he replies, “I _am_ here,” but both of them know it’s a lie, both know a part of him didn’t come back, that he isn’t all here.

Her words are unyielding when she tells him, “You can’t go back there. He’ll take more.”

His mouth presses into a line as he swallows. “I know.” Melancholy pinches at the corner of his eyes as he cups the side of her face. “You have father’s eyes now,” he tells her quietly, a bittersweet grin on his lips, “do you know that?” and she doesn’t think she’s ever seen Jon Snow so sad.

She knows then that his heart is already broken for father, for Robb, for others she doesn’t even know. She glances back at her father’s ghost, wishing for nothing more than that he could be there with them now because she can’t keep this secret from Jon Snow a moment longer.

“There is something I have to tell you,” she begins slowly, turning her eyes back to his, “it’s about your _mother_ . . .”

He says nothing as she explains that he is the son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark.

When she finishes, he’s slowly shaking his head back and forth as he stares at the forged face of her father, struggling to make order out of what she’s just said.

A queer laugh pushes past his lips. “That’s not possible . . .” he starts, pulling his head back, staring at her from the corner of his eyes as if she’s a stranger. “Father, he . . . But, then how did . . . If _they_ . . .then I’m,” His eyes snap to hers. “But, then _I’m_ . . .”

He slumps forward, taking a knee, gripping the hem of her gown.

She squats beside him.

 _“Jon,”_ she says softly, placing a hand on his back. He won’t look at her. “You have a claim to the Iron Throne.”

He rocks on his heels, slumping back onto his seat, his head in his hands and she wonders if he might be sick.

“This is madness,” he rasps.

“Is it?” she says.

He glances at her like she’s grown two heads.

“What did you just say?” she asks him. “Love makes people do strange things? Why did father never talk about Aunt Lyanna? Why did he refuse to tell even my mother who birthed you?”

He fists his sword hand so tightly she can hear the leather creaking.

“Lady Catelyn? He didn’t even tell _me_ ,” he says in quiet anger, “He _let_ me join the Night’s Watch.”

She frowns. “That doesn’t mean he didn’t love you.”

His eyes are angry. A warning.

She holds up her hands. “I’m not asking you to forgive him.”

 _“Forgive him?”_ The words are acid.

She sits down beside him then, hugging her knees to her chest, the ground cold and damp and seeping into this dull grey gown Sansa made her wear, but she doesn’t care.

“You have every right to be angry, Jon Snow—”

He snorts angrily. _“Jon Snow,”_ he says, looking at her. “Is that even my name, Arya?”

She blinks. “Of course it’s your name.”

“I was born in Dorne, if what you say is true. So how do you know?” His arms are resting on his knees and he lifts one, motioning to the iron strangers. “How can anyone now?”

He leans his head back against the wall, lost in his thoughts, anguish written all over his face as she releases a long defeated exhale, hating this and hating her father for lying to them all, for leaving this to her.

They are quiet for a long while, Jon glaring at their father’s ghost and her stealing glances at him wondering why it should matter if he has another name when he’s used this one all his life.

She presses her head to the wall, the granite cold and rough against her scalp and the dampness flattening the plaits Sansa had made her wake early to braid when she hears herself finally say, “Most people don’t get to pick, you know.”

He looks at her sideways, glowering.

“What?”

She nudges his shoulder with hers.

“Their _name_ , stupid.”

She’s trying to rein in a grin and he’s still glowering, but then his eyebrows begin to relax as a smile slowly tugs at the corner of his mouth and they both begin to chuckle.

“I suppose you’re right,” he says after a moment.

She reaches inside her cloak then to retrieve the parchments she’s been carrying since the day Howland gave them to her and as she hands them to him he looks at her questioningly.

“Robb’s will,” she explains, “and the other I don’t know.”

He turns the second parchment in his hands, his thumb brushing over the unbroken sigil of House Targaryen, and while he studies the scroll she studies him.

His mop of dark brown hair, though longer than she remembers, is still the same and falling in his eyes, but there’s a scar now on his left eye and another along the right side of his jaw that’s barely hidden beneath his stubble.

His lips are chapped and parted, his breathing uneven, as he takes off his gloves to push back his hair, rubbing his hands down his face, and it’s the mottled pattern on his right hand, the angry pink skin stretched so thin it glistens, that causes her to inhale.

She’d spent enough time around the Hound to know what must have caused it.

“What am I supposed to do with this, Arya?” he asks, waving the scroll in the air, eyes lost.

He means him, this new identity.

This _secret_.

He’s watching her as she watches him and his grey eyes are tired, but they are _his_. Not the man who lost something to the Red God, not the King in the North, but the _boy,_ Jon Snow, who loved her and whom she loved back.

 _Even if he **is** a dragon prince,_ she thinks, _he’s already given the Seven Kingdoms more than they ever fucking deserved_.

She will do whatever he asks of her though because Jon Snow means more to her than all the realms of men combined.

So she tells him then, “Fuck what our fathers wanted. We can either tell the north and have Davos open that scroll in front of court . . .or,” she reaches for his burned hand, weaving her fingers with his, “we tell no one and we both take this to our graves.”

A battle between shame and relief ensues on his face and she can’t tell which he’s considering more until he withdraws his hand from hers, looking away, shame winning.

His next words are quiet. “Which would you choose?”

She shakes her head. “This is your choice.”

“But if it were _yours_?” A muscle works in his jaw, his _tell_ , still the same after all these years, revealing he’s already decided, and he’s only asking now because he needs her to help him understand it.

 She leans forward, licking her lips. “When I was seven, Robb and you were always playing dragonknight. Do you remember?”

His eyes pinch and she can’t be sure if it’s from the pain of thinking of Robb or confusion at why she's asking, but he nods.

“You always wanted to be the Dragonknight, to be _Aemon_. You never wanted to be Florian the Fool or Cregan Stark. It was _always_ the Dragonknight.”

He snorts, rolling his eyes. “ _Everyone_ wanted to be the Dragonknight.”

She shakes her head. “Not Robb. He never did. That’s why you would only ever play with him.”

He frowns. “I played with you,” he says, but the words are uncertain.

She cocks her head, skeptical. “Not that game.”

He exhales forcefully. “I always wanted to be a Stark.” He pauses, staring at his burned hand. “I _wanted_ what Robb would inherit.”

“ _Wanted?_ ” She says. “Sounds like you don’t want it anymore even though you have it now.”

She’s leading him somewhere, but he doesn’t seem to register it because his face crumbles as his eyes plead with her to understand. “Not like this, Arya. I never wanted it like this.”

She reaches for his hand, squeezing as she says quietly, “I know that.”

And she did.

But needling in the back of her mind is a truth she had tried to bury until now. Robb left Winterfell to _her,_ giving her the means to rule a holdfast outright, without a marriage and without a man.

And she wanted it.

Her thoughts turn to Bran then, out there, somewhere, but Meera was still unconscious.

If Winterfell was anyone’s now, it was his.

Only the banners had picked Jon.

Robb’s greatest blunder, she knows, had been ignoring his bannermen and she wouldn’t make the same mistake.

She wouldn’t let Jon make it either.

 _“‘There must always be a Stark in Winterfell’_ father use to say and I’m not a Stark,” she hears Jon say, as if reading her mind, “The banners won’t like this.”

He wasn’t wrong. He wasn’t a Stark. Not in the way that counted. Not through his father. And when the banners found that out . . .

“You’re the only one among them who has battled a wight. Whether you’re a Stark or a Snow or a Sand or a dragon . . . none of it matters now.”

He laughs bitterly. “The banners won’t see it so simply.”

“They will once the dead come and they realize what you can offer.”

 He stares at her, confused. “Offer?”

 “Fire kills wights, you say.”

 He nods, waiting.

 “There’s another Targaryen with—”

 “—three dragons,” they say together.

“Request an audience with her,” she suggests.

He’s nodding his head slowly, considering, and he’s looking like he’s starting to feel better now when he turns her.

“We won’t need an audience,” he tells her, confident.

She’s not. “What?”

“I think . . .” A sly grin climbs up his face and settles in. “I think one of her dragons is mine.”

***

He is dreaming of a city made of ice rimmed with jade sand and black waves when Arya wakes him to tell him Meera Reed has finally woken, claiming Bran is alive.

Bran is at a village near Long Lake, Meera informs them, and the girl still looks half frozen, heaped in a chair in the corner, covered in at least four furs. Her black curls are matted in knots, as she stares into the steaming mug of mulled wine that she isn’t bothering to drink and is struggling to grip between her hands.

Two of her fingers have frostbite and Jon Snow frowns, knowing that she will lose them both. He watches as Arya takes the mug from her hands and sets it on the table beside her. Meera gives her a grateful smile.

They tried to bring Bran south to Winterfell, Meera explains, but the snows are too deep and the squalls too frequent and they had to turn back three times.

 _“They?_ ” Sansa asks and Meera tells them that it was Lady Alys Thenn herself, along with three spearwives who tried and failed to bring Bran south from the Wall.

“Eastwatch . . .” Jon starts, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes, not understanding why they didn’t just try to come by sea from the Wall, but Meera is unwilling to meet anyone’s eyes as she shakes her head and exhales forcefully, thrusting a scroll into his hands.

Meera has been abed a week and his jaw tightens, wondering if the news in this letter will be reaching him far too late.

They are seated in father’s solar – _their_ father’s solar, he reminds himself, glancing at Sansa and Arya – and he feels like an imposter here as he rises with the scroll so he can read it under candlelight.

The seal is broken but he recognizes it as Castle Black’s.

He reads the script rapidly.

“It’s from Lord Commander Tollett,” he quietly tells the room, scanning the words again more slowly and from the way the script slants he knows Edd had written it in haste, under duress, in _concern_.

He tosses the scroll on the desk as he leans over it, resting his knuckles on the surface.

Then he tells them Eastwatch is lost.

He grimaces as he thinks of Grenn and Pyp, both sent to Eastwatch at his command. A wight, eyes blue and skin cold, but with Grenn’s face comes into his mind then. His friend was dead now, killed on the ranging north to Hardhome.

_Dead, at my command._

All of the eyes in the room are on him, but it’s Arya’s he seeks out first. He’d told her the truth days ago, but if she is afraid, her eyes don’t betray it now, not even to him.

 _She’s too at ease_ , he thinks as he observes the relaxed set of her shoulders and then he realizes why: she’s already concluded that they’ve lost the castle for reasons other than the Others.

She had always been quick and Jon Snow would smile if it weren’t for the uneasiness that’s taken root in his gut whenever he looks at her. Where Arya has been since they parted is something she’s unwilling to discuss, but by the way she carries herself, the skill she demonstrates whenever he catches her in the practice yard, even turns of phrases he has heard her use, some laced with an accent he cannot place . . . he’s certain she didn’t spend all that time in Westeros.

When she’d arrived at Winterfell with two-dozen male companions, he was bewildered. She’d launched into a tale, explaining that she’d spent the last six years in the Riverlands, hidden away, playing the part of a serving girl at Acorn Hall.

But Jon had not only heard the lie, he’d seen it. No serving girl would have legs as well muscled as Arya’s . . . and the scowl on the face of the man next to her only further confirmed his suspicions. Jon was certain the man had heard the lie too and he was not happy to see her telling it.

Neither had Harwin seemed pleased by it given how he had glared at her, shaking his head, before turning to Jon with apologetic wide-eyes, as if he half expected to lose his head right there for allowing the Lady to lie to the King in the North.

But Harwin, along with all the rest of the men in his little sister’s company, must have decided her wrath would be greater than his because none betrayed her lie.

That thought _does_ make Jon Snow smile now.

These male companions are, if nothing else, entirely devoted to his little sister and for that reason alone he’d offered them shelter inside the walls of Winterfell.

That didn’t mean they didn’t trouble him. There was a red priest among them and Jon didn’t like the way the man stared at him curiously. He disliked even more the way the Smith stared at Arya.

Jon only needed to look at the man’s face to know he was in love with her.

Then Littlefinger had come to him, saying he was the bastard son of Robert Barratheon – a story that the Lady Brienne and Sandor Clegane all but confirmed – and he found himself studying the man, slowly agreeing that, yes, the resemblance was indeed there.

Only the man didn’t know who he was.

And neither, it seemed, did Arya.

Clegane had snorted when Brienne had shared that detail, but Jon hadn’t been amused because, seven hells, _he’d_ been that same man not four days ago and he found himself having sympathy for this usurper’s bastard, this smith who knows his little sister now better than him.

He glances at Arya, Meera Reed whispering in her ear, and for a moment he thinks she could be like any other girl, being told a secret by her friend, whispering about boys, but he knows that’s a lie because she isn’t smiling and she isn’t giggling the way Sansa use to do with Jeyne Poole.

Instead, she is staring at the Reed girl with parted lips and a rising chest, stealing a glance at him that makes Jon Snow wonder what has made his little sister so alarmed.

 _She’s not your little sister,_ a voice reminds him, _she never was._

He presses his eyes closed, grimacing from the bitter taste in his mouth. His sworn brothers had buried five daggers in him once, but those knives had hurt less than learning Arya wasn’t his little sister.

“The enemy?” Davos asks, drawing Jon’s attention back, as the man reaches for the scroll with a shaky hand. There’s unsteadiness in the old man’s voice. _Fear_.

The man had seen things on Skagos in an attempt to save the youngest Stark, terrible things, and whatever events unfolded there haunt him still. The boy had not survived, but it was of little consequence to Jon. He can’t remember the boy’s face or the little boy he had been. He only vaguely recalls that he once thought of the boy as his brother.

What Jon has not told the old man is where the boy is now and what he has become – a beast, unhinged and lurking on that island still, serving cold masters.

Jon exhales, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Jon, is it the Others?” he hears Sansa urgently whisper to his left and he shifts his eyes to her. Sansa is not Arya and she makes her fear plain on her face. He reaches to squeeze her shoulder, shaking his head.

“Mutiny,” he answers and beneath his fingers he feels Sansa’s shoulders relax, but his own body remains tense.

  _If Pyp’s still alive, enemies surround him now,_ Jon thinks, _and I sent him there._

The loss of Eastwatch puts them in a vulnerable position and he quickly decides to send half of the Vale’s forces to the Wall to restore order at Eastwatch and man the other castles.

_This southern army has yet to taste true winter._

Sansa disagrees. “The Lannisters are at the Neck’s doorstep. Who will protect the north if all our forces are at the Wall?”

He flexes the fingers of his sword hand, still stiff from sleep, and stares at her, thinking the answer obvious.

“The North,” he replies. Or what remains of it at least.

He isn’t fool enough to leave the defense of his home in the hands of Littlefinger’s foreign army and by sending half of Lord Arryn’s forces farther north he can even out the number of northerners and Vale men encamped outside the gates of Winterfell.

Sansa opens her mouth to speak only to close it again and he’s relieved when she has nothing more to say on the matter.

Then his eyes find Meera’s and he tells her he’s leaving for Long Lake at first light to bring Bran home.

Arya’s the one to protest now, leaning forward to rest her elbows on her knees.

“Your place is here,” she says firmly.

Given the way she’s glaring at him he knows she wants to say more and also that she _can’t_ because they both know he hasn’t told Sansa who he really is.

He’s told no one.

“Only Meera and I have been that far north. I know the route,” he says, glancing around the room, waiting for anyone to disagree, but his words are mainly for Arya and he finds her eyes last.

His eyes shift back to Meera, who is watching this nonverbal exchange between Arya and him and whatever the girl has observed seems to have made her ill at ease.

“The Lady Arya has a point,” Davos tells him.

He glances at the man, knowing he is right, but Jon won’t trust Bran’s life to anyone else. If he’s alive, then Winterfell is his and that makes him too valuable to trust to anyone else but him.

“Send Tormund and the wilding woman,” Arya suggests, reading his thoughts, and Sansa and Davos nod in agreement.

“They would be strangers to our brother,” he tells them. That last word, the one that is a lie now, pierces his tongue like knives.

He pinches the bridge of his nose again, tired from all this discussion and ready to put an end to it.

Arya rises and stands in front of him, squeezing his shoulders.

“You’re right,” she tells him and for a moment he’s pleased she agrees.

It’s only when he sees the satisfied smile growing on her mouth that he realizes his mistake.

He’s said exactly what she hoped.

And then she demands to go fetch Bran herself.

***

She hasn’t spoken to him in five days.

So when she enters the Great Hall, taking a seat across from him at the table he usually shares with his men, he’s certain she will be the end of him, but here he is anyway, smiling at her like a damn fool and trying not to stare too long because she isn’t wearing a dress and the way her leather breeches hug her bottom has him hoping she never ever wears one again.

They don’t talk about what happened with the Hound or how it took three grown men to pull him off the man or how, as a Lady of House Stark, she should be seated at the High Table with her brother and sister and not down here with him.

Instead, they talk about forge repairs.

When she asks him to show her the extent of the rot in the forge after the meal, he raises an eyebrow. Arya Stark has only spent brief moments in a forge with him and none were because she was interested in how it worked . . .

The men around the table are gawking at them. He knows why. A lady alone with a lowborn man in a forge in the evening is no place for a lady to be – even if the lady in question is Arya Stark.

“Come by in the morning and I’ll show you,” he offers instead.

She furrows her eyebrows. “No, it must be tonight . . .” she hesitates, staring at her ale, before adding, “because I’m going north.”

He opens his mouth to ask what in seven hells does she mean, ‘she’s going north’, but Harwin is scowling at him like he’s taken her maidenhead, and so he shuts his mouth, trying to ignore that part of him that’s spent too much time lately thinking about how much he’d like to do just that.

“North . . .” he says slowly. “Why?”

She doesn’t answer, taking a gulp of her ale instead and when she sets it down, glancing away, chewing her lower lip, his worry only rises.

“ _Arya,_ ” he grinds, and there’s a demand in there, that betrays his growing concern.

He shouldn’t be speaking to her like this or calling her that. Not here, among others. She should be _milady_ here, but his worry that she’s decided to do something dangerous trumps formality entirely and he opens his mouth to tell her that she’s lost her mind.

Anguy cuts him off, saying something about how _it’s not right to torture the lad like you are, milady._

She ignores Anguy, biting her lip again and fidgeting with the sleeve of her jerkin as she says, “I have to give you something before we leave. It can’t wait until morning.”

Harwin is glaring daggers at him now. Tom nudges him in the ribs, wearing a grin, muttering, “ _give you something,_ she says.”

Gendry ignores that, and looks at Arya, gritting his teeth, wanting answers, but her eyes are on Tom, who is chuckling as he smacks him on the back, squeezing his shoulder, saying wistfully, “I had a woman who wielded a blade once, aye, and she was _nimble_.”

He shrugs Tom’s hand off his shoulder and gives him a warning look, but the man’s not laughing anymore and his eyes are locked with Arya’s.

She passes her tongue over her teeth, leaning forward with her right arm on the table, but her left is under it and Gendry can guess what she’s holding and where it’s pointed.

“We are nimble,” she says to Tom.

Gendry shakes his head, disgruntled, as he leans across the table putting his hands between her and Tom and says, “Arya, let it go,” but when her eyes don’t leave Tom’s he knows she has no intention of letting this go.

“It only takes a knick,” she says with a shrug, as if she’s talking about something as lovely as spring, “but then you’ll be bleeding out all over the floor of my Hall.” She leans in closer. “And, I don’t want that mess, you see?”

Gendry shifts his eyes to her brother at the High Table, wondering if he’s watching this display. He looks just as troubled as Gendry feels, but not because of Arya. He’s staring at the Hound and the heated exchange he’s having with his other sister, with the Lady Sansa, on the other side of the Hall.

The men at the table have all grow quiet now, with Harwin gaping at Arya and Tom, looking like he might piss himself and Gendry’s irritation only grows.

Arya isn’t attractive when she’s like this and he doesn’t understand what happened to her after they parted to make her this way, but as he glances at the Hound, who’s now in Sansa’s face and speaking angrily, he can guess.

Fury begins to stir inside his chest then.

“Apologize to the lady,” he hears Lem suggest to Tom, as Gendry’s eyes shift between Tom and Arya and the Hound and Lady Sansa. When they return to the latter he notices a thin man step between the two, clearly in an attempt to defend the Lady and Gendry jerks his head back in surprise.

He _knows_ this man, but he struggles, for a few breaths, to remember from where.

_King’s Landing._

He’d repaired a Valyrian Steel dagger for the man once, nearly singeing his damn fingers off twice while he’d replaced the hilt with dragon bone.

Sansa is glaring at the thin man now and Gendry, wary, glances back at Jon, surprised when he finds the King in the North staring at _him_ , inclining his head toward the Hound.

 _Damn right, you should have let me finish what I started_ , he thinks smugly as he crosses his arms and shrugs at the King, his eyes saying _, just say the word and I gladly will._

A shadow falls over the table then and the distraction has Gendry glancing up.

It belongs to one of the men that pulled him off the Hound days ago. The red-haired wildling Tormund and beside him is another tall man, round-faced and red-bearded, who could only be the man’s son.

“I meant no offense, milady,” he hears Tom saying, drawing his eyes back to Arya.

“Offense is exactly what you meant,” Arya says coolly as Gendry rises to greet Tormund.

The wildling is assessing the situation at the table and raising an eyebrow at him, as he nods to Arya, clearly _impressed_ before he leans in to whisper in his ear. “Best steal her quick, lad, before someone else does. This is a woman who won’t stay free for long.”

The wilding points to his son and Gendry follows his gaze to find the man staring at Arya with wild eyes that could only be described as _hungry_ and Gendry scowls.

“Don’t mean to interrupt a woman when she’s about to poke a man’s member full o’ holes,” he hears the wildling say as Gendry glares at his son, debating whether to put his fist in his face, but then Tormund tosses a roughspun sack on the table before Arya, the contents clinking loudly.

“The bag o’ glass for when we go North,” Tormund says. Arya doesn’t even flinch, her eyes never leaving Tom’s face. Tormund leans down close to Arya’s ear then. “I see now why he took all them knives for you,” he whispers.

The words mean nothing to Gendry, but they clearly have an impact on Arya because she stiffens and finally turns from Tom, staring at the wildling oddly . . . _contrite_ as behind her Tom breathes out a sigh of relief.

“Mind if I borrow your smith?” Tormund asks, turning to Gendry and smacking him on the back, pointing at the Hound. “Could use your help reigning in that big fella again over there.”

When her gaze lands on the Hound Gendry watches as she takes in the scene, her eyes narrowing to slits, her mouth hissing, “what does he think he’s . . .”

She trails off, as her face registers some understanding of what is occurring on the other side of the hall and when she rolls her shoulders back he knows Arya is considering intervening. He barely has time to grip her shoulder, rooting her in place, as the sound of cracking bone echoes in the hall and then everything happens at once.

Arya rises out of her seat, Needle in hand, as Jon charges down from the High Table and Gendry and Tormund rush toward the Hound as he lands a second blow on the thin man’s jaw.

Gendry is half way across the hall when he feels Arya fingers on his elbow, pulling him forcefully back.

_Damn she’s quick._

“Stay,” she tells him and he thinks she’s gone mad as he tries to shrug her hand off his arm, but she fists her fingers into the leather of his jerkin, her eyes pleading, “I . . .” she stops, shaking her head and he realizes she’s trying to choose her words carefully. “That’s Littlefinger,” she finally says.

It takes only a moment to recall why this man matters to her.

She had told him once, one night when she’d crept into his room at the Inn, about how her father had been betrayed and also how, at the heart of that betrayal, laid a man called Littlefinger.

He glances at the man in question as Jon and the red-haired wildling try to restrain the Hound.

“Littlefinger?” He says slowly, shifting his gaze back at her, “ _That’s_ Littlefinger?”

“Yes,” Arya hisses as she squeezes his elbow tighter than any woman her size should be able to do.

Jon is still trying to pull the Hound off of the thin man, but Sansa is glaring at him, saying something angrily to him. He rises, arguing with her, looking at her disbelieving and pointing to the Hound who is struggling against Tormund as he lands another punch on the thin man.

Gendry moves again to help the wildling, but Arya tugs on his arm again.

He can hear Arya breathing in rapidly through her nose, but it’s only when he feels her trembling beside him that he shifts his eyes to her, alarmed. Her shoulders are tense, her entire posture rigid, and her other hand is gripping the hilt of Needle so tightly her knuckles are white.

But she isn’t trembling, he realizes.

What she is, he finally sees, is shaking with rage.

Then, he understands, abruptly, why she’s gripping his arm severely, holding him back. . . Why she’s looking at him like that . . .

It isn’t to keep _him_ from going over there. It’s to keep _her_ from doing it.

“Sansa must do this,” Arya tells him, “not me.”

Tormund has subdued the Hound and Littlefinger is stumbling to his feet, but when the thin man places a hand on Sansa’s forearm Gendry feels Arya’s fingers release their grip on his arm, cold steel in her eyes.

“And she will,” Gendry tells her, his words firm.

“But if she doesn’t—” she begins as she takes a step toward Littlefinger, her face like the one she wore when he found her straddling the corpse of Walder Frey.

He reaches for her shoulders then, holding her firmly against his chest. She’s lost in some haze of rage and the only way to pull her out of it, he knows, is with distraction so he squeezes her shoulders tightly until he feels her wince as she glances back at him, angry.

He stares right back as he points to Sansa who is saying something in haste to Jon, gesturing to the thin man. “If your sister doesn’t,” he tells her as Jon jerks his head back, alarmed, with a face full of rage that he’s turned on the thin man, “then your brother will.”

Beneath his palms Gendry feels some of the tension in Arya’s body melt away and when she turns back to look at him he doesn’t give a damn that he has his hands on the King’s sister, in full view of everyone because the relief in her eyes is worth a thousand punishments.

Then both their eyes grow wide, not quite sure they believe what they’re seeing as Jon throws the thin man half across the hall and crashing into a table of eating men. Gendry can’t say he feels sorry for the man as Jon strides toward him, hoisting the thin man up against the wall by the collar of his surcoat.

A gasp escapes Arya’s lips then and she takes an abrupt step back, her shoulder blades hitting Gendry in the chest so forcefully that he has to grip her waist to keep his balance as Jon says something in a commanding voice.

“ _What_ did he just say?” Arya asks, furious. She doesn’t think she heard him right, but Gendry swallows, knowing that she has.

“A trial,” he answers.

“A _trial_?” she spits. “What he deserves is a _block_.”

_***_

There is no time to process Jon’s display of rage as she’s standing in the Hall discussing how quickly dragonglass daggers can be turned into dragonglass arrows with Gendry, Jon’s advisors, and the people that will go with her to bring Bran home, Meera, Val, Tormund and his son, Toregg.

Jon has just explained he’s sending them north to fetch Bran as Gendry glowers at her while he dumps out the contents of the sack Tormund had given her onto a table. At least four-dozen daggers pour out of it, but only a smattering of arrowheads follow.

As he estimates the number of arrows that can be made from the daggers he fluctuates between shooting her concerned glances and angry glares.

She presses her lips together and crosses her arms. She can feel Meera’s eyes on her as she shares a look with Jon, silently asking for a lifeline.

Instead of giving her one, Jon points to his chest.

 _Me?_ He mouths, raising his eyebrows, shaking his head, as if to say, _oh no, little sister,_ _I’m not getting in the middle of this_.

She scowls at him as Val gives her a sympathetic smile, but Sansa openly frowns at her with disapproval and Arya can’t be sure if it’s because he’s a bastard or she’s being unladylike.

Sitting at the end of a bench, watching this all unfold with wild curiosity, is the red-haired wildling muttering _kneelers . . ._

“Why do you need arrows? The daggers will do,” Gendry says.

It’s Val who answers. “To avoid close combat.”

Gendry levels his eyes, as careful words come out of his mouth. “Against what enemy?”

Meera & Tormund exchange an uneasy glance, Gendry catching it, and Arya glances at Jon, uncertain.

She won’t lie to Gendry. She licks her lips to speak, but Jon steps forward then and cuts her off.

“The Others,” he tells Gendry.

Gendry runs his tongue over her teeth and crosses his arms, shaking his head. He’s troubled by all of this, she knows, but what she’s finding interesting is that he isn’t bothering to hide it from anyone, not even Jon and so she flushes, simultaneously angered and warmed by this display of protectiveness.

He exhales and glares at Arya, before turning his glare on Jon. He tents his fingers on the table before the King.

“The Others are north of the wall, and you say these four—”

“Five,” Meera corrects him, “we five.” She had insisted on joining them back north and Arya doesn’t miss how Gendry glances at the woman’s bandaged hands.

“These _five_ are supposed to be staying south of it,” Gendry continues, looking at Meera and then gesturing to the rest of the party, his eyes lingering longest on Toregg, before landing finally on Jon, “so what need would they have for this glass, Jon?”

Beside her, Sansa bristles at the use of Jon’s given name and Arya wonders when it was exactly that Gendry got on a first name basis with her brother.

“The villages around Long Lake have no dragonglass,” Jon tells him, yet words unspoken hang in the silence that follows. _But they may have need of it soon._

It isn’t a lie, but it isn’t the truth either so she isn’t surprised when Gendry makes it clear he isn’t buying Jon’s explanation.

“Then have a smith there melt down the daggers for arrows,” he suggests stubbornly. He knows there will be no smith in these villages. “It will be quicker. Your forge is bleeding heat, Jon. I’ll need the timber to repair the roof before I can even get it hot enough to melt obsidian.” He pauses, shaking his head, looking at the blades. “And even then it might not work . . .” he finishes, more to himself than to the room.

“Har. Southerners,” Tormund says, shaking his head. He walks to the table and picks up one of the arrowheads, holding it between his thumb and forefinger. “You don’t need fire to make arrows. Give me a decent rock and I’ll file one o’ them daggers down to arrows,” Tormund says.

Gendry nods as he shrugs. “But if we melt it, we can get twice as many arrows.”

He looks back at Jon, waiting for him to admit the truth about the dangers of this journey north and she frowns, realizing he’s more perceptive than she gives him credit for. While he may be acquainted with Jon, he’s still the King and Arya can see that Gendry is trying not to insult him.

Jon is holding his ground though. So Gendry moves around the table and leans against it, crossing his ankles, in front of Jon.

He motions to the pile of daggers behind him before he crosses his arms. “I know of only one other use for dragonglass . . . so unless you’re planning to create dragonsteel in the middle of the frozen north, you mean to find the Oth—”

“Dragonsteel?” Jon cuts him off with a start as he rapidly closes the distance between him and Gendry. He narrows his eyes. “You mean Valyrian Steel?”

Gendry pulls his head back. “ _No_ , I mean _dragonsteel_ ,” he says slowly and points to Longclaw on Jon’s belt. “Valyrian Steel is something else. They are two separate alloys.”

Jon grabs his shoulders. “Tell me everything you know of it, Gendry,” he commands, but Arya hears the desperation in his voice too.

Gendry uncrosses his arms and straightens. “We’ve lost the means to forging it. I only know what I picked up while apprentice to Mott. When he’d be in his cups he’d sometimes spin tales about dragonsteel and his training in Qohor. He said it was forged like common steel – heat, hammer, fold – the only difference laid in the tempering. And dragonsteel is tempered with dragons’ ichor and a bit of melted glass.”

A pit opens in Arya’s belly.

Jon’s brows furrow in confusion. “Ichor?”

“Blood magic,” Davos supplies.

“Sorcery,” Val hisses, with distaste.

Bile rises in her throat. In the House of Black and White, she knows, they would both be right.

“Aye,” Gendry says, nodding, “It’s a substance found in dragonblood, but to forge the steel it needs to be separated out.”

“Why this sudden interest in dragonsteel, Jon,” Sansa asks.

Jon glances at her over his shoulder, answering hurriedly, “A brother of the Night’s Watch found a manuscript at Castle Black that said it could be used to kill Others,” he turns back to Gendry, determined. “You said that the means to forging it were lost, but if dragons have returned . . .” Jon trails off, hopeful.

Gendry frowns, and crosses his arms, shaking his head. “Mott said the smiths in Qohor couldn’t forge the steel even while dragons still lived. It’s the _method_ for separating the ichor that’s been lost.”

 _No,_ she thinks, grimacing, _it hasn’t._

She’d learned the method to the separation in the House of Black and White. It was taught as part of a deeper secret, a deeper learning, the last one given to a Faceless Man and the knowledge did not come without a price.

Dragon’s ichor was sacred, like all ichor, but dragons were also mystical and that made their ichor dangerous. Using it to make dragonsteel was only scratching the surface of its possibilities.

It was this substance, mutilated and bastardized in a misunderstood ritual that created the Others and it was this same ritual, used millennia later, that rid the world of dragons.

The method of separation and the ritual were two different things, but The Guild had guarded these secrets for centuries for both reasons. They had not forgotten when they were slaves to dragon lords.

To reveal either secret now in front of half a dozen people who are little more than strangers to her would be _reckless_ , but she hesitates even more to reveal it to Jon Snow.

She cannot trust Jon with this. Not now. Not given who is. She isn’t even sure _what_ he is . . .

 _Jon must find the dragon, but only you can use its ichor,_ Howland had told her.

She sucks in a breath as the impact of that hits her.

Yet, if ichor could also be used to destroy the enemy it had created . . .

She bites her lip, shuddering slightly as she remembers the sacrifice that had been collected from her when she learned the method of the ichor separation. To perform the full ritual required even more.

She hadn’t been willing to pay it.

Gendry shifts his eyes to her, and whatever he sees there has him uncrossing his arms and staring at her, _concerned_.

Revealing this secret would place her life in mortal peril, but with what was coming for them, her life was already in peril . . . along with all the lives in this Hall, in Westeros, in the world.

Her mind flashes to Jon’s face then and the conversation they shared in the crypts.

After she’d told him they needed dragons for allies, his gaze had remained uncomfortably fixed on her face and she’d realized that he was taking the measure of her, deciding whether she wanted the truth of what they faced or if she would rather the lie he’d been telling everyone else instead.

In a whisper he had told her _dragons aren’t enough to win this war_ , and that _the Wall has never been tested, Arya._ She had stared at him then, unsettled, the hair rising on the back of her neck, as she struggled to remember a time she had ever seen Jon Snow so terrified.

What he had left unsaid, but that she’d read plainly on his face, was that he didn’t think the Wall would hold.

 _I don’t know how to stop them if they get south,_ he had finally confessed, and she knew immediately that this was a burden Jon had shared with no one else.

She had turned to him then, breathing words in an urgent whisper. _How did you fight them north of the Wall?_

His words had been warm on her lips, but the blood in her veins had turned cold when he’d answered. _We didn’t,_ he’d said, grimacing, _we_ _ran_.

Eastwatch may be lost already. _There were dead things in the water at Hardhome,_ Jon had told her in the crypts.

 _Find the dragon_ , Howland had said. Where was it now? _One of her dragons is mine,_ Jon had cryptically told her. He’d said he had _called_ it.

Bran needed to get South. _He has seen the Wall in ruins_ , Meera had hissed in her ear the night she’d woken, _he is the last greenseer. He needs to get to the Isle of Faces. We are running out of time._

And Arya had the means to buy them some.

She glances at the Reed woman now who is staring at her, inclining her head with frustration toward Jon as if she knows what Arya is about to do and is encouraging her to just get on with it already.

 _Jon doesn’t have to know the secret or even the method to obtaining the ichor,_ she tells herself. _No one does. Jon simply needs to believe that dragonsteel is possible._

With a grimace, she squeezes her eyes closed. “No,” she says quietly, “it hasn’t been lost.” All the heads in the hall turn to her. “The Faceless Men know the method.”

Jon rounds on his feet in an instant, his eyes finding hers, burning with a question, blistering her skin.

_He knows._

“A man . . . ” Tormund says slowly, “without a face?”

“Doesn’t sound like a man at all to me.” Val says with mistrust, shaking her head.

“It’s a manner of speaking. They’re paid assassins,” Davos explains, before turning to Arya, “you speak of rumors from the time of the Freehold, princess.”

If he wants to think she’s speaking of rumors, she isn’t going to stop him.

Jon’s eyes haven’t left her face. “Murderers for hire out of Braavos . . . ” he murmurs, more to himself than the hall. On the last word, Gendry shifts his eyes to her, but Arya keeps hers fixed on Jon. “They can change their faces the way other men change their clothes . . . ” Jon trails off, staring at her, disbelieving, his eyes silently asking the question as they slowly travel the length of her body, assessing whether or not she could be one.

When he finally decides, he takes a step back from her, his sword hand fisted so tight she hears the leather creak and the look of regret on his face has her wishing he’d buried a knife in her gut instead.

Sansa eyes Jon fretfully as she asks, “How do you know this Arya?”

If she were still no one, the Kindly Man would be pleased with the half-truth she tells next. “I met one.”

Gendry’s head jerks up at that and she knows his eyes are narrowed to slits, but she can’t bear to look at him because if she does, she knows, the careful mask she’s barely keeping in place will disintegrate.

Jon is raking her with an accusing look as he flexes his sword hand, reforming it into a fist. _Met one?_ Those grey eyes are asking. _Or you are one?_

Behind him, Gendry slowly pushes off the table, glancing at Jon’s fist, wary, and then at her, worried. He takes a careful, deliberate step forward.

“Where?” Jon asks, not bothering to hide the accusation in his voice.

It’s Gendry who answers as he positions himself between the two of them. “At Harrenhal.”

But Jon ignores him, still staring at her and for a fraction of a second he lets her see – and only her – just how stunned he is and then she watches as he forces the shock away, replacing it with a mild disinterest as his sword hand releases and his shoulders relax. Even his eyes seem to regain some fondness for her.

She’d always thought Jon Snow terrible at hiding lies, but now she finds herself wondering if he’s as skilled a liar as her.

He turns away from her. “Rumors are no help to us,” he says, his tone leaving no room for argument and Arya’s mask _does_ fall then, as she gapes at him, realizing Jon Snow has changed the subject to cover for her.

“We’re here to discuss retrieving Bran. The arrowheads . . .” Jon says, trying to remember where they were.

Gendry crosses his arms then, the irritation in his voice plain. “You were explaining why they need dragonglass _south_ of the Wall if the Others are supposed to be north of _it_.”

She opens her mouth to say the arrows are just a precaution.

Gendry cuts her off, pointing a finger at her. “Don’t,” he warns forcefully, “If all that’s going to come out are lies, Arya, then don’t.”

She winces as Gendry’s words slam her back a few paces and Jon’s head jerks up, his careful mask of disinterest long gone, replaced with a warning look, but Gendry’s holding firm, defiant and she grimaces as she watches Jon’s sword arm shake and his jaw tick.

The room is quiet then.

Sansa seems ready to remind Gendry of his lowborn place as Arya places a hurried hand on her arm to put an end to that strategy, silently communicating a _no_ and a _please_ _don’t._

Tormund is glancing at Jon and Sansa, unsure if he should speak, knowing it might be unwise, but clearly too eager to hold his tongue.

Val though . . . and Meera, they are staring at Jon Snow, who’s still glaring at Gendry and whatever is on their minds has these women severely troubled. It suddenly makes Arya troubled too.

“Listen hear lad,” she hears Tormund guffaw, Jon’s shoulders relaxing with the sound, “the way she almost poked that kneeler’s pecker full o’ holes earlier, I’d wager she won’t be needing our help . . . It’s us who’ll be needing _hers_.”

Gendry exhales loudly and shifts his hands to his hips, looking at his feet, shaking his head, muttering, “that’s what I’m afraid of.”

He glances at Tormund, weighing the situation, rubbing the back of his head. She can see the outline of his chest as his jerkin stretches across it.

“I don’t like this, Arya,” he finally says, as if that weren’t already obvious, as if she’s the only one in the hall, and there’s an intimacy in his words that leave her feeling exposed.

He’s staring at her with a face she’s never seen before, one filled with fear and anger and concern, but also something else and she can’t fault him for it because she knows her face would look the exact same if he had just told her he was going to do what she’s about to do.

“I know you don’t,” she tells him, “and I don’t either, but Bran is my brother and so here we are.” She gestures around the hall to remind him that they aren’t alone.

“Nymeria will go with you,” he says firmly and she nods as something twists inside her, remembering other words Howland had told her.

_When you go for Bran keep Nymeria close._

“The glass is just a precaution, lad,” Tormund says, but his playful tone is gone as he adds, “We’ve all battled the Others. Your woman couldn’t be in better company.”

She grits her teeth. “I’m not his woman,” but the moment the words leave her mouth she blinks, startled, because the words, she realizes, are a lie.

Her eyes land on Gendry’s as she chews her lip and with one look she knows he heard it too because he’s scratching his forehead as if he’s deep in thought, but what he’s really doing, she knows, is trying to hide a grin.

She flushes, looking away, her eyes turning to Jon’s, whose gaze is slowly shifting between Gendry and her as if he’s reaching some unexpected conclusion. Arya can only imagine what one as she shifts her feet under his scrutiny.

“Ah, but you want to be.” Tormund says, and then he smacks Gendry on the back, squeezing his shoulder. “What did I tell you, lad? Best steal her—”

“ _Tormund_ ,” Jon says sharply and Arya could swear _he_ was flushing. “We aren’t north of the Wall here. Arya is my _kin_.”

“ _Kin?_ ” she blurts before she can think better of it. The word is sour in her mouth and leaves her glaring at Jon. He glares right back at her as if to say, _well what do you want me to say instead? Cousin?_

She crosses her arms and exhales loudly. Meera bizarrely steps forward then, giving them both a warning glare.

“We’ll need to leave as soon as possible,” Val says in an attempt to bring the conversation back to the matter at hand.

Gendry sighs in defeat, then raises his head to Jon as he motions to the table with the daggers. “Get me the timber for the forge, a few carvers and I’ll have four dozen arrowheads ready in two days time.”

Jon looks at Davos. “Get the timber cut from the wolfswood at first light.”

Gendry picks up one of the arrowheads on the table, holding it between his fingers and then looks at Meera. “You and Anguy will test these tomorrow to see how well they fly and make any improvements, but Jon . . .if you know where to get more of this—”

“There are mountains of it on—” Davos starts.

“Dragonstone, aye,” Jon finishes, pausing to look at Sansa, uneasy. Arya knows why. She knows what he means to do, to go there, but Sansa doesn’t and when she finds out she’s not going to be pleased.

“With enough carvers . . .” Gendry says.

Jon turns back to him. “We could have weapons for every castle and man on the wall.”

Gendry nods.

“The wildlings can carve,” Tormund offers, lifting up his hands and turning them. “We aren’t like you southerners with your soft, pink hands.”

The barb causes a faint grin to bloom on both Jon’s and Gendry’s faces, but then Jon turns to Gendry. “Now the rest of you may leave,” he says as his eyes shift to hers, stern, daring her to disobey the order and she's confused as to why until next he says, “I’d have words with my smith. _Alone_.”

"Jon . . ."

"Go Arya," Gendry tells her, his eyes not leaving Jon's.

It's Meera who tugs on her arm, dragging her reluctantly to the door as she whispers comfortingly, "Save your worry for later, once they're both gone."

But as she closes the doors, the hall behind her, the words leave Arya feeling nothing but troubled.


	3. Chapter 3

“This . . .” he says, reaching above his head and pointing to a hole in the thatching, “needs to be repaired before anyone can utilize this forge properly.”

Arya moves closer to follow his gaze as he stretches on his toes. With his height, his fingertips easily brush the wood and she follows his hands as he moves them along a beam, pointing to a section where the wood has begun to rot. 

Gendry is still stretching, testing the wood with his hands, saying something about how there is not enough iron for smelting, but her eyes are no longer on the dilapidated state of her forge. 

They’re traveling down his torso where his tunic has hiked up, exposing a strip of skin, following the trail of hair there where it disappears into his breeches. 

She swallows, her mouth dry. 

“Arya?”

Gendry gazes down at her from his toes, looking at her expectantly and she bites her lip because she has no idea what he’s been saying. 

Judging by the grin he’s fighting to stamp down, he knows it too.

“I’m going to patch it,” he tells her as he places his boots flat on the ground again. They are standing so close she wonders if he can feel the heat rising in her body. 

“Jon will have someone else do it when they bring in the timber,” she tells him.

He raises his eyebrows. “It’s a quick fix, Arya.”

“Someone else can do it,” she repeats.

He stares at her curiously as he steps closer. “And I’m telling you _I’d_ like to do it.”

“You’re my _friend_ ,” she tells him, her irritation growing for reasons she can’t explain just now, “not Jon’s hired hand.”

 _“Friends,_ ” he says slowly, tasting the word, as he nods his head and closes the distance. “Is that what we are?”

Her brows pinch at the question. She doesn’t know what _this_ is or what they are doing or what it means. She only knows she hasn’t the strength to stop when she’s near him because _this_ is the only thing keeping her steady, from being swallowed by this grim future that’s coming for all of them.

She ignores the question, motioning to the mattress in the corner instead. “Are you sleeping here now?”

He grins. “You wouldn’t stay in that room either if you had to listen to Tom’s snores all night.” 

She frowns, glancing at the undisturbed linens. “Have you been up all night?” she asks him quietly.

He shrugs. “Couldn’t sleep,” he tells her as he turns back to the workbench, picking up a pair of long tongs and hanging them on the wall, “and the dead don’t rest. Figured I’d work.” 

She rubs her arms even though it’s warmer in the forge than without as the things Old Nan would only tell the boys about when she was little tug at the edge of her mind.

Jon had always refused to tell her what the old woman had said, no matter how much she begged, but she’d been bigger than Bran then and smarter, so when she’d threatened to tell mother she’d caught him climbing trees he’d spilled.

Those are the stories coming back to her now. A night that never ended . . . cold dead things lurking in the wood . . .when mercy was a mother suffocating her own babe.

_How did you fight them north of the Wall?_

_We didn’t. We_ _ran_.

She turns to the window then to make sure the daylight is still there, but the sun is already low in the sky even though the evening meal is still hours away.

“What are you thinking about,” she hears Gendry say, an edge of concern in his voice.

Her eyes remain fixed on the window when she answers. “Them.”

“Arya,” he says slowly, “They aren’t here.”

But the words provide neither of them comfort because they both hear the unsaid _yet_ at the end of them.

She’s never seen the Wall, but she thinks of it now and of the weight of what losing it will mean for all of them.

That nervous feeling in her belly unfurls then, clawing up her throat and crawling down her spine, gooseflesh spreading like a rash across her limbs as her pulse quickens.

For a breath she’s confused. She _knows_ this feeling, she’s felt it before, but the last time was so long ago now, when she stood on the steps of the House of Black and White and so it takes her a moment to give it a name.

_Fear._

She can feel Gendry’s gaze on her and when she turns, shifting her eyes to his, nervous under his scrutiny, he straightens, alarm in his words.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong,” she tells him as her lips try a smile but end in a grimace. 

His shakes his head, crossing his arms, irritated. “Then why do you look like that?” 

“Like what?” 

His eyes rove her face critically. “Like someone has died,” he says, reaching for his jerkin.

She crosses her arms. “I don’t look like that.”

He pauses, his arms halfway into the sleeves, his face disbelieving. “Yes. You do,” he tells her, shrugging on the jerkin. 

“Well you look just as miserable,” she says with irritation. 

Even in the dim light of the forge she can see the muscles in his arms bristle as he leans back against the workbench, stealing glances at her, waiting for a better answer.

When she doesn’t offer one he rubs a hand down his beard, asking, “Does that grimace of yours have anything to do with why you’ve been avoiding me?”

She gives him a look. He can be stupid about some things, but this isn’t one of them.

They both know she’d been avoiding him because of what he did to the Hound’s face. His nose was broken and the good eye – the one the Mountain hadn't pressed into the fire – was swollen shut. 

Yet the world is collapsing around them, everything uncertain, and she needs for him, for _this_ , whatever it is, to not be one of those uncertainties so she tells him “Nothing is wrong with _us_ ,” even though she’s not sure they even are an _us_. 

He studies her face, his mouth twitching. 

“Then come here,” he finally murmurs, “because whatever _is_ wrong has you terrified.” 

As she watches him push off the bench, it unnerves her that her face reveals this much to him, but he knew her, she remembers then, before she became no one. 

She wants to tell him that she isn’t terrified as he reaches for her hands, that Arya Stark does not fear death, but as the distance between them closes and his arms circle her waist she hears herself whisper the truth instead. 

“I’m scared.”

And she isn’t sure, in that moment, if she means of _them_ or of him and of _this_. 

“Me too,” he whispers back. She can feel his chest rise against her own as he inhales deeply, pulling her closer, her body slowly humming to the rhythm of his fingers low on her back. “Do you remember what you told me once about fear?”

She is silent for a few breaths as she captures his gaze, unsure.

He tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear, his thumb lingering to trace her cheek. “You said fear cuts deeper than swords.”

Syrio’s words, words that had given her the courage to knock on the door to the House of Black and White and that she’d later forgotten there, wrap around her now like a shield.

“It does,” she whispers as she chants the words to herself, the fear slowly beginning to ebb, replaced with fortitude.

“Those words got me through the days we spent at the storehouse,” he tells her solemnly. 

They’ve rarely talked about what happened there and she knows it’s the memories –his of Lommy and hers of Jaqen and the countless opportunities that came after to kill Roose Bolton, to save her mother, to save Robb and the lives of his men – that keep them from discussing it.

“I had forgotten,” she tells him softly cupping his face. “I needed reminding.”

“You did,” he whispers, pressing his forehead to hers as her fingertips trail down his torso, exploring the shape of him. Beneath her palms, she feels the muscles there pull in as he breathes in and his body responds to her fingers. 

“ _Arya_ ,” he breathes. 

“Yes?” she hears herself say. 

“What are we doing?” he murmurs, the words hot on her neck.

She pulls back to look at him. “I don’t know,” she whispers truthfully, dropping her gaze to his lips, “but I don’t want to stop,”and then she rises on her toes to press her mouth to his.

His lips brush against hers slowly, uncertain, once and then twice, before he pulls her to him, claiming her mouth with his own. She parts her lips and when the kiss deepens it makes her blood sing and her body _thrum_ and she never wants this to end, but then it does as he breaks it, whispering, “Arya . . . there’s something I have to tell you.”

The way he says it makes the smile on her lips die. She stares at him then and he pulls away, uncertain, rubbing the back of his head.

“What is it?”

Then he tells her he’s the bastard son of Robert Barratheon.

She gapes at him, blinking, and then she . . . guffaws. “Are you having a go at me, Gendry Waters?”

But the look on his face makes her laughter evaporate as he tells her, “I swear to all the gods that I’m not, Arya.”

She is quiet for a long while then, staring at him, looking for the resemblance. He was nothing like that man, that man that made father kill Lady, drunk and fat and capable of everything but _leading_ . . .

Yet . . .as she studies Gendry’s face it’s his eyes, so blue they remind her of the waters in the canals of Braavos, that have her realizing it could be true and she sucks in a breath.

“ _Seven hells_ ,” she murmurs.

“Seven hells,” he repeats dryly.

She takes his hands then. “How do you know this?”

“Your brother.”

_That’s why Jon had needed to speak with him alone._

Her list is what she thinks of then and how it’s still too long because Cersei Lannister yet lived and the woman had tried to kill not just her, but Gendry too.

“The Gold cloaks . . .” she whispers, stepping closer.

He nods. “That’s why they wanted me.” He grimaces then, staring at their entwined hands as he says sourly, “I met him once. As a child. He nearly trampled me with his horse. That’s all I know of him.” 

She frowns, embracing him. “Would you like me to tell you about him?” she whispers softly. 

She hadn’t really known the king, but her father had told stories of him from the time she was small and that was more than Gendry would ever get. 

“No,” he tells her, pulling back and cupping her cheek. “We have more important things to discuss,” he murmurs and she doesn’t know what those things could be, but the way he’s looking at her, warmth pooling in her belly, has her thinking she’d like to stay here all day listening to them. 

 _What things,_ she’s about to ask, but his mouth on hers cuts her off. 

“Gendry are you—” comes a halting voice from behind her and before she can open her eyes Gendry’s lips are off hers, as he takes several paces back, creating space between their bodies. 

She turns. 

There, glancing between her, and then Gendry, is Jon, trying to hide his embarrassment. The silence stretches between the three of them until Gendry finally says, “The timber’s ready?”

Jon nods, staring sideways at Arya with a questioning brow, battling a grin and she’s sure her cheeks are crimson as he holds out his arm to her saying, “Come with me. I’ve something to discuss with Sansa and you.”

As she exits the forge she glances back at Gendry who merely grins, crimson too, as Jon leans in beside her to whisper in her ear.

“You’re lucky it was me who caught that rather than Sansa,” he jests, mussing her hair and she flushes.

She halts her steps. “You saw _nothing_ Jon Snow.”

He snorts. “Oh I saw something, little sister,” he tells her, “but, for you, I’ll pretend it was nothing.” 

***

Two day before Arya leaves for Bran he announces his decision to travel to Dragonstone to collect as much dragonglass as they can manage. Sansa disagrees with the choice, telling him his place is here, in the north, protecting their people, and storms off.

He can’t find it in his heart to tell her that he’s starting to believe his place is somewhere else.

Jon moves to follow her, but Arya’s fingers wrap around his elbow, slowly drawing him back.

“She’s worried you’ll become another one of her ghosts,” she says gently, releasing his arm, “let her go.”

He reluctantly does as he leans his back against the wall of the covered bridge opposite her, both standing in silence, her casting her gaze down on Sansa crossing the practice yard and him casting his gaze on her. 

As Jon Snow watches her cross her arms over her chest, he wonders if she’s protecting herself from her own ghosts too. He wants to know who her ghosts are. He wants to know how many are the same as his.

She’s dressed like a man, in leather and furs and the sword he’d given her all those years ago is strapped on her hip, but in this light he thinks she could still be the little sister who showered him with kisses before he left for the Wall.

Her hair is no longer a bird’s nest, falling now in waves so long they almost skim her waist and she’s grown taller than he would have ever expected, reaching his shoulders, but – _he smiles_ – she is still _too_ skinny. 

It’s her grey eyes that are most changed, sad now, like her father’s, clouded with that same sort of regretful melancholy that so often filled his.

_That fill my own._

“I’ve heard you say their names,” he says quietly. He had that night in her chambers, that night she’d wept and screamed after returning to Winterfell.

Her body remains perfectly composed with his confession, her face a mask, revealing nothing and Jon Snow tightens his jaw, unnerved. This is not the Arya he remembers – she was not nearly so stoic and _never_ still.

Her eyes are still fixed on the yard below when she finally says, “Just ask, Jon.”

But he’s not a fool. He knows she would never let it be that easy.

He frowns and instead says, “You’re afraid you’ll forget them.” 

She turns back to him abruptly, her expression troubled. “You’re not?” she asks.

His nightmares will never let him forget, but she doesn’t need to know that so he simply shakes his head.

He squints to make out her features in the moonlight.

 _She’s beautiful when snowflakes are falling in her hair,_ he thinks, as his mind drifts to another Stark and another time and his throat grows tight.

Robb’s face, wearing a look of a disappointment, flashes in his mind.

 _She’s our little sister,_ the face says, _why didn’t you protect her?_

 _She’s not your little sister,_ another voice answers, _not anymore._

He fists his burned hand, eyes squeezed shut, yearning to go back, knowing none of them ever can.

She’s staring at his hand when he opens his eyes. “How . . . how do you remember?” she asks, the words shy.

“They come back,” he tells her, thinking of the nightmares, his voice hoarse. “The memories . . .”

But she’s thinking of something else, he knows, when she asks him then, watching him closely, “All of them?”

 _No,_ he thinks, trying not to grimace, _not all of them._

He doesn’t need to say it. She already knows the Red God took something, but the tension that climbs her face with his silence has his throat growing tighter still because he knows she’s troubled by whatever he is now.

He pushes his back off the wall and moves to stand next to her, brushing snowflakes from her hair as he tells her, “You remind me of the last time I saw Robb.”

She blinks, her gaze dropping to her shifting feet and the habit causes a slow grin to grow on his face.

 _This_ is the Arya he _knows_ , nervous and fidgeting, biting her lip, and it means his little sister is still in there somewhere, but he frowns, wishing he were finally being reunited with her under different circumstances. 

He’d be amused while he asked her, _what have you done now, little sister_ , and she’d answer with a story about some prank she’d executed perfectly, but these aren’t those circumstances, he knows, because she isn’t his little sister and she isn’t just executing pranks.

_She’s a different sort of executioner now._

She recognizes her shifting feet and halts the motion, leaning her hip against the ledge instead and when she turns to him, her eyes disappointed, she asks, “Why didn’t you kill him, Jon? He betrayed our father. He deserves no trial.”

 _He wasn’t my father_ , he almost says. 

Instead he tells her, “What sort of King would I be if I killed him?” 

She exhales forcefully, shaking her head. “A just one. A _northern_ one.”

He winces. The truth was he hadn’t killed the man because he knew Gendry was Robert Barratheon’s son and Jon needed the man to state it before the northern lords if his plan was to succeed.

Gendry had a claim to the Iron throne, a tenuous one, but a claim all the same and Jon intended to keep the man, the last of House Barratheon, close. Yet, the events in the Hall a night prior complicated matters, for Jon Snow is certain Arya is in love with the man.

It gives him nothing but unease.

A Stark and a Barratheon together would be a threat to Daenerys Targaryen and her claim on the throne.

Last night he’d poured out two ales and told Gendry to drink his down. When he’d had, Jon asked, _do you know who your father was?_

Jon had been surprised when the man tensed and replied dryly, _You’ve been speaking to the Lady Brienne. She’s a theory I’m some Barratheon bastard._  

Then Jon had told him it wasn’t a theory, that it was true, but that hadn’t surprised the man either. _I suspected,_ he’d said bitterly, as he explained how he'd come to meet his little sister and the Gold Cloaks that’d come looking for him with Yoren. 

 _We buried him,_ Gendry had told him, and from the set of his jaw it was clear the man was still angry about what had been done to his black brother. It was then that Jon Snow decided he liked this man and rose to pour them both another ale.

 _Tell me what happened to Arya after that,_ he’d asked quietly. Gendry had hesitated for a breath before he’d launched into a tale that made Jon’s heart break for his little sister and when Gendry’s fury had flared as he explained how the Hound had taken her Jon finally understood why he’d beaten the man bloody in his yard.

 _She won’t tell me what happened to her after that,_ the man had said grimly, _but after tonight I suspect she found her way to Jaqen._  

_Jaqen?_

Gendry’s mouth had turned sour. _The Faceless Man we met at Harrenhal._

_You're bothered by it?_

_You’re not?_ Gendry’d asked.

 _Deeply,_ Jon’d admitted, frowning. _Why aren’t they hunting her?_

_I wonder the same . . ._

He looks at her now and asks if they are.

She hesitates, rubbing her hands on her thighs, her mouth pressed into a tight line and shrugs. “I don’t know . . . Probably. Yes.” 

She wasn’t even hiding. She was in the first place they’d look. Why had they not come for her?

“Why did you leave them?” he asks. 

She shakes her head so fiercely he thinks she might knock something loose. “I can’t tell you that, Jon. For the safety of all of us, I can’t tell you.” 

“How many people have you killed for them?” 

Her eyes give the answer. 

_Too many._

There is something cold and calculating in her gaze and it collides with his memory of her, of the little sister who once asked in laughter for his help filling Theon Greyjoy’s boots with sheep shit.

She turns her back to him, staring down at the yard and then, in a voice so small he almost thinks she’s nine again, she says, “You’re ashamed of me.”

He squeezes her shoulders. “No. What I am is worried. So is Gendry. Why didn’t you tell him any of this?”

That question was something Jon had mulled after he’d parted ways with the Smith and he suspected it had something to do with the man’s safety but Jon Snow would rather have answers than guesses. 

She snaps her eyes to his, her next words curt. “What good would that have done?”

He can’t decide if the fear in her eyes is for Gendry or for herself and what the man thinks of her now that he knows the truth.

Jon Snow shakes his head. “What good? The man’s in love with you, Arya.”

She tenses, glancing away. “We’re called Faceless for a reason, Jon. Him knowing puts his life at risk.”

_For Gendry then._

“ _I_ know,” he points out.

She shakes her head. “Contracts for kings are _expensive_. They won’t come hunting _you_ to get to _me_.”

That sobers him.

“Alright. He isn’t a king, but his life is at risk just by being with you, regardless of whether he knows the truth or not.”

“He isn’t _with_ me,” she says, biting her lip, “He’s my friend—” 

Jon fights a grin, amused. Anyone with eyes knows he’s more than that to her. 

"What?" she asks, crossing her arms, critical. 

“Listen to me, little sister. A man doesn’t beat another man bloody like that for a _friend_. Did you see how he swung that hammer?”

It had been like something out of one of Ser Rodrik’s stories . . . Robert on the Trident, swinging his giant warhammer, smashing it into Rhaegar’s breastplate as rubies scattered . . .

Jon had loved those stories once, but now the thought leaves a foul taste in his mouth and he grimaces.

“I saw,” she says, irritated.

“I could use a man like him,” Jon tells her seriously.

“If you mean a stupid one,” she motions toward the forge, “have at it.”

 _Does Arya know?_ Gendry’d finally asked after the third ale. _About my father?_

 _No,_ Jon’d replied, _and I’ll not be the one to tell her. You must,_ and then he’d matched the man’s gaze, watching him closely as he added, _because she’s in love with you._

_Jon— Your grace—_

Jon’d cut him off. _And you’re in love with her._

He’d let those words hang for a few breaths, as Gendry remained still, staring at him, until he finally said firmly, _Are you going to execute me for it?_

Jon’d kept his gaze still, a sour taste in his mouth, as he answered. _No, I’m going to do something far worse._

He looks at her now, wondering if Gendry has spoken to her yet.

“Arya, what do you know of his parents?”

“He told me, if that’s what you’re asking.” She looks at him then, her eyes burning with accusation. “What did you tell him about me last night, Jon?”

Jon snorts. “He told me far more about you than I told him. Like where you’ve been these last six years.”

“Does he know I’m Faceless?”

“He suspects.” 

That ashamed look is back in her eyes.

“Whatever it is you did, it can’t be more terrible than the things I’ve done,” he tells her honestly, trying to reassure her, but she buries her head in her hands telling him that she thinks it is.

“Tell me,” he commands then, but she won’t look at him.

“You will hate me,” she protests, sounding like she’s nine again, caught skipping her stitches and if the discussion weren’t so serious he’s sure he would be laughing.

He puts his finger under her chin instead so she’ll meet his eyes and what he sees there almost breaks his heart so he tells her, _“_ I promise you little sister, there is nothing you could ever do to make me hate you.”

She’s struggling to believe him though, asking him to promise he won’t and as he reaches for her, her body trembling against his, her hands fisting his jerkin fiercely, his heart breaks anyway because that voice reminds him again that she isn’t his little sister now, not anymore, not in the way that counted.

“Come with me,” he murmurs softly into her hair then, offering her his hand and when she slips her fingers through his hers are delicate like Sansa’s, but it’s her palms, callused like a warrior’s, that have him realizing this girl who was once his little sister is now a woman grown.

He leads her to the godswood. 

Leaves the color of wine rustle with a song as they kneel before the heart tree, but Jon Snow can’t help thinking that the words are meant for someone else now, _for Starks_.

 _Am I still one? Do I still belong to the old gods?_ As he stares at the face carved in the pale bark, he isn’t sure of the answer. 

He confesses first.

“I abandoned my vows to the Night’s Watch.” 

Arya’s grey eyes are sad as she says quietly, “I know that Jon.” 

“They don’t,” he replies softly, motioning to the weirwood. “I abandoned my vows for your father once too.” 

 _And for Ygritte,_ he thinks sadly, but Jon Snow can’t bring himself to tell Arya about that.

Arya is quiet for a few breathes then and watching him carefully, a battle of wills, as he silently waits. 

“When I was nine,” she says slowly, her voice barely a whisper, “I killed a stable boy with Needle while escaping King’s Landing.” 

It takes all his strength to keep his face from crumpling at that.

“I sent my friends to their deaths,” he tells her with a grimace, the thought of Grenn and Pyp making his chest tight, and it’s then that he knows what he is doing here with Arya in the Godswood is as much for him as it is for her. 

He looks at her, his eyes ashamed, waiting for her to give it to him, her _disappointment_ , that he left his friends to die, but instead she says, “I sent a friend to his death too. Mycah. The Hounds killed him for something I did.” 

“I forced a woman to abandon her son.” He frowns, remembering how Gilly had cried, knowing that her son was now Val’s in all but blood and would never be Gilly’s again. 

She leans her head on his shoulder as she pulls Needle off her belt. 

“I lost this once,” she tells him. “But the Hound helped me kill the man who took it and then I killed that man’s squire and friend.” He can feel her tense against him as she fidgets with the blade. “I stabbed one of them until long after they were dead,” she murmurs, grimacing with shame.

He drapes his arm over her shoulder.

“Stannis offered to make me a Stark, to give me Winterfell if I’d bend the knee . . .” he pauses, a knife twisting inside him, as he glances at the pale bark remembering, “and burn the heart tree.”

And for the first time since the two of them began this odd confessional she breaks her stoicism and says, “it’s not a confession if you didn’t do it Jon.”

“No,” he agrees, “But I’m guilty of wanting it. I’ve always wanted it and that is enough.” These are words she’s heard before, words he’s only ever shared with her and the Old Gods.

“I killed a brother of the Night’s watch, a singer, who’d left his post.”

Daeron. Jon’d been the one to send the man to Braavos and he struggles to hide his startle, suddenly uneasy as he’s confronted with a question he never thought he’d be asking himself.

_Did she kill Sam too?_

“I sent him there. Was another with him?” he asks her.

She peels her head off his shoulder. “The fat one?”

“Sam.” His voice is thick. “I sent him to Oldtown to become a Maester.” 

“He was your friend,” she observes. “He was still alive when I saw him. Someone had been trying to kill him.”

 _Seven Hells,_ he thinks, _Sam could have brought her to me._

“I killed a black brother too,” he says quietly, “a man I admired.”

 _You know nothing Jon Snow,_ Ygritte’s ghost reminds him.

He shakes his head. They are here for Arya’s ghosts, not his.

Arya is quiet though, as her eyes shift from his to the carved face in the pale bark and they are shining when she murmurs, “I killed Arya Stark.” The words are so soft Jon isn’t sure he’s heard her right until she repeats them, more confident this time, “I killed Arya Stark . . . so I could become no one.” 

“No,” he tells her softly, cupping her face as her eyes shift to his. “You wouldn’t be here if you had,” but his words, he sees, offer her no comfort because her eyes are grim.

He rises then and moves to the still pool, turning his back to the heart tree and to her because he’s not sure he can look at her face as he makes his last confession.

“You asked me what the Red God had taken,” he says.

“I did,” she says, her voice as still and flat as the pool, but he hears the apprehension in the words.

“It was Ghost,” he tells her quietly.

“But . . . he is always with you.”

He turns pushing his hair back from his eyes. “ _I’m_ still a part of _him_. But to me he’s just a shadow now, a—” 

“—ghost,” they say together in a whisper and he nods. 

“That’s not all he took,” Jon whispers and she waits. “He took Rickon too. I don’t remember him.” 

She glances then at the weirwood with eyes that are almost . . . _angry,_ placing her palm to its bark as she murmurs something, a prayer maybe, before she turns back him.

“They _take_ , Jon. All they do is _take_ ,” and he knows she means the gods, thinking with a frown that she's right. “They took father, they took my mother, Robb,” she looks away glaring at the carved face, “they even took _you_.”

 _We should have stayed in that cave,_ Ygritte’s ghost whispers and Jon Snow wishes again, like so many times before, that they had.

“What was her name?” he hears Arya say and when he turns, she’s standing and staring at him sadly. 

‘Who?”

“Your lover.” She says the last word as if she’s seasoned in the art and he grimaces, wondering if she may be now after spending years wearing faces that weren’t hers. “What was her name,” she repeats softly.

Nobody ever asks him that. _Her name._ It makes his mind remember an image of her before a campfire, her toothy grin, the firelight dancing on her hair . . .an arrow buried in her chest. He looks away, surprised the memory can still elicit such a response from him.

 _You know nothing Jon Snow,_ Ygritte’s ghost tells him again. 

Arya must see the truth on his face. “She died,” she whispers.

Wordless, he nods, his chest tight. 

“Tell me about her,” she says, the words sincere, and so he does.

“Ygritte,” he hears himself say, his voice hoarse, as it occurs to him he doesn’t know the last time he spoke her name aloud. “Her name was Ygritte.”

He tells her then how they met, how he came to respect the wildlings, about how brave she was, how beautiful . . .

When he’s done she tells him, confident, “I would have liked her.” 

“Aye,” he agrees, smiling softly as he reaches to muss her hair, “she reminded me of you.”

He watches then as a smile blossoms on her lips, chasing the flush that is growing across her cheeks and the sight warms a place inside Jon Snow that he thought would never thaw.

He sees his opportunity then and asks, “How did you get to Braavos?”

She cocks her head to the side, her lips fighting a grin, one eyebrow hiked. Jon knows this look.

“There are these wooden crafts built by men called _ships_ . . .” she tells him. 

Jon wants to tighten his jaw and make plain his disappointment with that answer, but instead his finds himself grinning like an idiot and releasing a chuckle.

The sound of her laughter is airy and light and the essence of that girl he left behind so many long years ago, the one that had showered him with kisses because he gave her a sword, but that girl is gone, he knows and she no longer needs him to keep her safe.

So instead he decides he will help her salvage what remains of her.

“Tell me, Arya,” he says quietly then, “all of it, and tell it true. From the moment you left King’s Landing.”

He waits, watching her closely as she inhales deeply, expelling a defeated sigh. “It’s a long tale, Jon.”

He sits, patting the space next to him as he draws a knee to his chest. “Best start telling it then, little sister.”

She considers him, deciding, and when her brows pucker together as she sits beside him, releasing a shaky breath, her shoulders relaxing as if the weight of the world has just lifted off them, he abruptly realizes she’s grateful to finally have someone who she can tell it to.

She unsheathes the blade he’d given her all those years ago then and offers it to him. “It started with Needle . . . ” she begins, as he takes it from her hands, “father found it in my room one night . . .”

And when she is done, staring at him, waiting for the other shoe to drop, he knows she’s left out truths, vital truths, truths she does not trust him with, but he doesn’t care because the path forward couldn’t be more clear than if the gods themselves had laid it bare.

“Arya, I need you to do something for me,” he murmurs, turning to her slowly, “for the north, for all of us.”

“What?” she breathes.

His smile is sly. He can imagine no one better.

“Be my Mistress of Whisperers.”

***

The night before she leaves for Bran she sneaks into the forge, expecting to find him asleep on the mattress in the back, but instead his chest is bare beneath a leather apron, his hair falling in his eyes, damp with sweat, as his hammer bangs away at a strip of iron as if it were some awful foe.

He doesn’t look up when she enters and she isn’t certain he even heard her come in until he says, “What are you doing here, Arya? It’s the middle of the night.”

“No one saw me,” she tells him as he lifts the sword, quenching it in a nearby water trough. She watches as it resurfaces and he lays it across his palms, inspecting it, frowning, clearly unhappy with the result.

He sets it aside, reaching for the ties on his apron. “It’s too damn cold up here,” he grumbles, but as he says the words he’s wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his hand and she can’t help but smirk.

“You don’t _look_ cold,” she tells him, her eyes on his chest as he lifts the apron over his head.

He pauses, finally looking at her as he replies, “You should be sleeping.”

“Can that sword wait until first light?” She doesn’t wait for an answer as she tosses him his tunic.

“Arya . . .” he says, uncertain and she watches as he rubs the back of his head wearing that pained look that means he’s thinking too hard, probably about what her brother will do to him.

“Grab your furs too. I want to show you something,” she tells him, not interested in hearing any excuses.

He hesitates. “Where are we going,” he asks as he finally pulls on his tunic, trepidation in the words.

“I hope you’re not afraid of the dark,” she tells him. Her smile is wild. _“Or heights.”_

***

She slips her hand through his once he’s dressed and leads him to the south gate through an alcove where she pulls him into a tunnel that lines the inner wall of Winterfell. The tunnel is narrow, with only enough room for people to walk in a column.

Although they climb inside the inner wall of Winterfell and up three levels, they somehow exit at ground level and it throws his sense of direction entirely off. 

He’s out of sorts, Arya noticing and she turns back to him, inclining her head, pointing to a set of out buildings he recognizes as he slowly realizes they have climbed half way around the castle. 

She leads him past two watchtowers, the remains of glassed gardens and the entrance to the crypts before they enter a small wall that leads to another inner courtyard and from there they enter the backside of the godswood, following the wall in the darkness until she abruptly stops, pointing to a spot where the wall abuts another out building.

“The rear of the guest houses,” she explains, where he had been staying and which sit across the yard from the forge.

He stops his feet, releasing her hand, pointing to the forge. “So we _could_ have just walked here, then?” he whispers.

She rolls her eyes. “I just showed you a secret passage and _that’s_ your question?” she whispers back.

Vaguely, he wonders what her brother will do if he finds them out here alone, but in the darkness she’s searching for his palm again and when she finds it he decides he’s fine with his head rolling if it means one more night next to her.

But Jon doesn’t plan to make his head roll, Gendry knows. 

 _Are you going to execute me for it?_ He’d asked the king when he’d figured out he was in love with his sister.

 _No, I’m going to do something far worse,_ Jon had said glumly.

Gendry’d swallowed. _What?_

 _Ask you to go to Qohor with her after we’re finished at Dragonstone._  

_Your grace—_

_Jon._

_Jon . . . You want your sister,_ He’d said slowly, _to travel to Essos with a bastard?_

 _A bastard with a claim to the Iron Throne,_ Jon’d said flatly, _who knows the lore of dragonsteel._

_I’m still just a bastard._

_And I’m **just** a bastard King with the power to legitimatize you. If that will make you agreeable to going with her I will do it._

Gendry’d struggled to control his anger, knowing he was being manipulated. They were both bastards, but they were hardly the same. He’d grown up in Flea Bottom, whereas Jon had grown up in Winterfell alongside the Starks and alongside their privileges.

 _What I am won’t matter if we don’t have a **dragon** when we get there, _ he’d told him.

Then Gendry’d gaped as Jon told him that he would have one, but his shock had quickly boiled into rage, directed at Jon, for being reckless with Arya’s life. Whatever was required to separate dragon’s ichor came at a price. He’d seen that plain on Arya’s face when she’d spoken about it.

Gendry’d crossed his arms then, defiant, his words measured. _Do you know what she went through to get back here, Jon? Whatever happened to her in Essos hurt her. I’m not taking her back to that._

 _I don’t Gendry,_ he’d said quietly, his face grim, his shoulders slumping, _and I wouldn’t be asking if I saw another way._ Jon’d turned to him then, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, more a brother than a king and said _, Neither of us will keep her from this war, but at least this way she’ll be kept far from what’s coming and what’s coming, I guarantee you, is a fate worse than whatever she went through in Essos._

Gendry’d uncrossed his arms running his hands down his beard, begrudgingly agreeing that Jon Snow was right.

_I’ll do this Jon, but there’s no guarantee we’ll even succeed._

_I know,_ Jon’d grimaced as he rose to pour them two more ales. _I only ask that you try._

Somewhere around his fifth ale with the King, Jon had leveled with him.

 _I won’t take your head, but Daenerys Targaryen may not be so kind if she finds out who you are, Gendry_ _and I need men like you in the wars to come._ Jon had paused to grin. _Not to mention my little sister will not be pleased if you die and I mean to see her happy. I’m offering you my protection in exchange for your help with this, but also my permission to wed her. I meant what I said about legitimatizing you._

The words had rocked Gendry back against his chair and then he had laughed. _Do you mean to make her loathe me, Jon? Arya? Wed?_

Jon had laughed then and pushed another ale in front of him. _I don’t mean to make her do anything. I’m giving you permission to court her, to ask her. Whether she’ll **let** you is entirely up to her. _  

As Gendry stares at her now, that wild smile on her lips and her eyes bright with mischief, thinking of what Jon has offered him, the sight of her in the moonlight paralyzing him, he knows he’ll do whatever it takes to make her his.

But she thinks he’s hesitating now out of concern and says, “Why are you staring at me with your worried face?” 

He squeezes her hand, pulling her to him, a teasing smile on his lips. “What sort of trouble are you about to get me into Arya Stark?”

He leans in to kiss her, but she pulls out of his grasp, grinning wickedly, as she tells him, “The good kind.” 

He smells the pools before he sees them, crinkling his nose, the scent in the air reminds him of steel, of a forge and then he feels them in the dense air that's hot and humid in this part of the godswood. Hot steam billows from their lips, blanketing the forest floor, the fresh snows melted away, and for a moment he closes his eyes, pretending it’s still summer.

The ground is moist as Gendry walks toward the lip of one of the pools, and crouches, dipping a hand in. The waters are warm and inviting as they glide along his fingertips and she moves to kneel beside him, mimicking his movements. She’d told him about the pools once before, long ago, when they were still with the brotherhood and it was still summer. On summer nights she and her brothers or sometimes just she alone would sneak out and come here to float in the hot heat of the waters.

A smile tugs at the corner of her mouth as she rises again. “I’m dipping my feet in,” she declares as she begins toeing off her boots and raises her eyes to his. “Join me,” she says. 

But he doesn’t know how to swim and tells her so.

She raises an eyebrow, amused. “Well it’s a good thing we’re not swimming, then.”

When his expression remains skeptical, she tells him the pools are shallow as she bends down to roll up her breeches, exposing her calves and the woolen stockings that cover them and he watches as she removes them delicately, slowly, in the way, he thinks, a courtesan might.

He needs no more coaxing then as he kicks off his boots, rolling up his breeches too.

***

They take seats near the pool’s edge, their shoulders brushing as her toes lift off the warm rocks and pass beneath the water’s surface.

She closes her eyes, listening to the waters gurgle against a rigid outcrop that’s now smooth and rounded from years of the waters lapping at it’s corners and edges. The rocks are grey, like House Stark, and speckled with silver flecks that glitter when the moon is high. When she was little Robb use to tell her the flecks were snowflakes that got trapped inside.

Arya leans back on gloved hands, and glances at Gendry. The someones she has left are still someones she can lose and he’s one of those someones now. As she studies him as he studies the moon, hidden behind passing clouds, she wonders how many nights they have left that will be like this.

She shivers, knowing it has nothing to do with the cold or the man touching shoulders with her, but he notices all the same and drapes his arm around her, pulling her close, as she leans into his shoulder while he kisses her hair.

She stares into the surface of the water at their huddled reflection. _We look content_ , she thinks and she _feels_ content, even safe, here in his arms, their fingers drawing circles on each other’s bodies.

But she’s scared of him and of _this_ and the way he makes her feel because this fear is _new_ , one spurred only by _him,_ and that somehow makes it worse than all the rest as dread pools in her belly.

 _Fear cuts deeper than swords_.

She peels her head off his shoulder, lifting her eyes to his, suddenly wanting nothing more than to be rid of this muddled feeling.

His eyes are clear and so blue when she lifts her hand to his cheek, glancing at his lips, his beard scratching the skin on her fingertips as she pulls his mouth down to hers. He doesn’t resist as she brushes her lips against his, but instead wraps his arms around her tighter. 

It’s a simple kiss, soft, sweet even, and over too quickly. His fingers come to rest on her neck as he breaks it, pressing his forehead to her.

His gaze stops her breath, his eyes mesmerizing, searching hers for something and she knows then she’ll go mad if she stays afraid of _this_ or of _him_ for even a moment longer. 

She hates herself for what she says next because in this life the two of them are very likely doomed, but to not _know_ this fear, to never explore it, scares her more than the thought of experiencing it.

“Come in the water with me,” she whispers. 

She moves her fingers to the ties on her cloak, but Gendry stills her hands with his. 

“We’ll swim,” she tells him.

“It won’t be just swimming,” he argues, “not now.”

She rolls her eyes. “I’ve seen you naked half a hundred times.”

She means it teasingly, but when she finishes the words he’s staring at her with hunger that leaves her breathless and she’s certain that she’s redder than him. He exhales forcefully then, shaking his head, rising, but his feet are wet now and he struggles to maintain his balance on the rocks.

“We were children then,” he tells her, shaking his head, “and that was before I knew . . .” He pauses, motioning with his hands to the space that now exists between them. “Before _this_ started.”

But, she is done lying to herself and she is especially done lying about how she feels about him.

 _“This?”_ she says, mimicking his hand gesture from a moment before, “We don’t even know what _this_ is,” but she knows that’s a lie. She knows what this is. She wouldn’t be here if she didn’t, and neither would he.

Yet neither knows what to call whatever it is they have between them. 

 _This_ will have to do. 

She rises, her toes gripping the rocks for balance. “I want to find out. Don’t you?”

“No,” he says, as his hands come to rest on her waist.

She battles a grin. “Liar.” 

For once, he doesn’t disagree, but she also knows he doesn’t think this is something they can have and so she demands that he explain why not.

He presses his lips together and slams his eyebrows.

“You know why not,” he tells her, frustrated, “there are a million reasons why not,” and she knows he is thinking of all them when he sighs, releasing her waist, inching away.

She’s cold without his body against hers and decides to seven hells with him as she begins to undress in front of him. He gives her a warning look, demanding to know what she thinks she’s doing, but she’s not interested in explaining herself and when her fingers reach the hem of her tunic, he runs his hands through his hair and turns around.

She’s in her small clothes when she jumps into the pool and pushes her body down under the waters until they lap over her shoulders.

“Gendry,” she murmurs, “turn around.”

But he doesn’t. Instead, with his back still to her, he begins to undo the laces on the breeches.

And it’s when he _doesn’t_ leave his small clothes on that she realizes she’s no longer the one making the rules.

_***_

He feels her eyes on him as he undresses and the thought of her watching him arouses him more than he cares to admit.

So when he turns around and she turns her back to him in the water, he doesn’t entirely mind, but he still teases her for boasting about seeing him naked half a hundred times.

He’s tentative when he reaches the water’s edge and asks again how deep it is.

Rather than answer she demonstrates, her back still turned, standing up in the pool, and he realizes that in his hesitation she somehow found time to remove her small clothes too.

He suddenly has second thoughts, unsure how he’s going to restrain himself around her as he watches the waters lap at her waist, her back glistening, but his feet are lead and he can’t make himself walk away.

He slowly enters the pool, instead, gliding his arms over the water’s surface, keeping a safe distance from her as he dips to his knees.

“It’s hotter than I thought,” he finally tells her after a moment and she turns to look at him, her gaze on his, _wanting_.

He gulps.

“Mm-hmm,” she replies, but his eyes are on the water because with the moonlight – _gods_ – he can see the outline of her body and his cock jumps at the sight.

“Tell me about the million reasons,” she asks.

 _“Arya—”_ he starts.

“Are you worried about your virtue, Gendry Waters?”

She flicks the surface of the water with her fingers, but he is too far away for it to reach him.

He sighs. “You know that it’s yours I’m worried about it.”

She glances at him. “What if I told you I have none?” 

He rolls his eyes, knowing she’s testing him for a reaction. “I’d say you’re a liar,” and she is, about this, he knows, she is.

She shrugs. “Then I’d say you aren’t very good at spotting lies.” 

He narrows the space between them, quiet for a breath, matching her gaze. “But, I am with your lies,” he finally murmurs.

“You are,” she whispers, the words candid, surprising him.

She bites her lip then to keep a smile from growing and he finds his own smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

“Is my maidenhead all that’s bothering you about _this_?” She asks, the words sincere, as she motions with her hands to the air between them.

 _No,_ he thinks, her virtue is not all that bothers him. Most nights it is that he can’t have her in the way he wants, his only solace coming from the fact that he doesn’t think _any_ other man will ever have Arya Stark in the way he wants, either.

He runs his hands through his hair and over his beard, saying none of that as he thinks of Jon’s words.

_I’m giving you permission to court her, to ask her._

Instead he simply says, “that and more.”

He can tell she is annoyed with his evasiveness when she moves away from him to the edge of the pool, leaning her back against the granite outcrop that forms along its sides, crossing her arms.

He follows her, restraint be damned, mimicking her posture, but spreading his arms along the rocks, shutting his eyes, and trying to quell the desire growing in his groin as he leans back against rocks that are hot between his shoulders blades, wishing they were cold instead.

When he opens them again, he catches her staring at the muscles on his chest and it takes everything in him not to pull her to him and kiss her right there when he sees the flush rising on her cheeks.

He abandons his evasiveness then and tells her the truth. He tells her the thing that needles at him most when it comes to his feelings for her. 

“You’re not just highborn, Arya, your brother is a king.”

She raises an eyebrow, making a face and despite the seriousness of this conversation he finds himself laughing.

“I only count _three_ reasons so far, Gendry. My virtue . . .” She ticks the rest off as her fingers glide against the surface, flicking water in his direction. With each one she moves closer. “I’m highborn . . . My brother . . .” she raises her eyes to his, “You said a _million_.” 

But he can’t appreciate her playfulness right now. He needs her to be serious, so he slides along the rocks to create more distance between them again as he says words to her he’s never told her before, but that have plagued his mind all too often.

“If Jon asked you to wed a Lord to keep the North, would you?”

He studies her face as her brows stitch together and her lips press into a thin line, her silence answer enough when she finally looks away. 

He knows she knows who he is now, a Barratheon bastard, and what that means for them, but he says the words aloud for the both of them anyway. 

“If _I_ were a Lord would you wed me?”

She leans her body off the rocks, wading closer to him, and when she shifts her eyes to his her gaze contains a vulnerability that he rarely ever sees.

“I don’t need you to be a Lord, Gendry. I don’t want you to be one, either.” 

“But if I _were_?”

She appraises him then, relenting, indulging him in this what-if. “That depends.”

“On?”

“What kind of husband you plan to be.” Her mouth puckers as her head cocks to the side and he knows she’s about to penalize him for something, but he can’t imagine what until she says, “Jon told me you asked him to keep me from going north for Bran.”

He snorts, shaking his head, irritated. “Of course I did, Arya.”

“Do you intend to do that every time I do something you don’t agree with?" 

He can’t keep the edge from his voice. “If it’s this dangerous, then, yes, I probably will.”

“Fine, but then you can’t get angry with me when I do the same to you every time you decide to do something stupid.” She glances away then, quiet for a breath before she asks, “Are you going to try to keep me from this war, Gendry?”

He wants to laugh at the ridiculousness of what she is saying, but he refuses to mock her while her guard is down, so he is quiet when he peels his body off the rocks and moves toward her.

“I don’t want you anywhere near this war, Arya,” he tells her seriously, “but I’m not fool enough to think I’d ever succeed in keeping you from it.”

 _Would that I could,_ he thinks, but guilt burns in his chest because he was trying. Jon and he were trying.

Her next words aren’t at all what he expects to hear.

“Fine then.”

He swallows and he knows he should take a step back, but instead he finds his body moving closer to hers. He levels his eyes, shocked. _“Fine?_ Fine what?”

She shrugs as a slow smile rises on her lips, settling in near her eyes. “I’ll consider your proposal.”

He chuckles softly then, knowing he has her. “But milady,” he says, moving closer, his smile roguish. “I haven’t _asked_ you yet.”

_***_

She draws her mouth into a thin line and rakes him with a disinterested glare. “Well I have other suitors, if you’re not interested."

“What?” He straightens. “Who?”

“Ned Dayne,” she says casually, “didn’t Jon tell you?”

But Ned has made no such advances, and now she’s simply torturing Gendry for teasing her about marriage.

“The Starfall Lord?” Gendry snorts, crossing his arms. “You’d die of boredom.”

She shrugs. “I thought him handsome.”

“You’d skewer him in his sleep,” he tells her.

 _Or you will,_ she thinks, as she catches the jealousy flaring in his eyes.

She snorts. “How do you know I won’t skewer _you_?”

He battles a smile. “Who would laugh at your terrible jokes then?”

 _Jon,_ she thinks at once.

Instead she rolls her eyes saying, “You laugh at my jokes specifically because they _are_ terrible.” 

She expects him to tease her again but instead his eyes pinch and he laughs softly, “I do.”

She stares at him then and the way he’s gazing at her causes a familiar feeling, one she’s only ever indulged while alone, to grow in her belly.

It’s Gendry who finally breaks the silence. “Has Dayne really asked to wed you?”

“No,” she admits, feeling guilty then for tormenting him. “Is that what you’re afraid of Gendry? That I’m going to run off and marry some Lord at the first sign of trouble in the North?”

“I know you Arya. If it means helping Jon, I have to consider the possibility that you might.”

She glares at him then, unsure if he even knows who she is, her guilt gone, replaced with the anger that only an old slight can bring. “I’m not _you_ Gendry,” her words are quiet and cold. “ _You_ were the one that left _me_ , remember?”

He squeezes his eyes closed, grimacing. “Arya—” he starts, stepping closer, but stopping short of closing the gap. “We were . . . I didn’t . . .”

He stops, frustrated, shaking his head, that pained look on his face, the one that tells her he’s thinking too much, but she isn’t going to help him. Not with this. He owes her this and she’s waited nearly a year without saying a word for him to finally explain it to her.

He sighs heavily then. “I regret so much about that night,” he finally says.

She snorts angrily, glancing away. He isn’t the only one.

“Arya, please look at me.”

She doesn’t because if she does she thinks she may punch him.

“At Harrenhal all you wanted to be was a smith. You wouldn’t even help me rescue Glover, but then we were with the Brotherhood and you suddenly wanted to be a knight. Why?”

Gendry is silent for a long while before he answers.

“You truly don’t know?” His words are strained, as if she’s wounded him instead of him wounding her. “I did it for you,” he murmurs.

She looks at him then.

“For me?” She rolls her eyes, disbelieving. “How could that possibly have been for me? Explain it to me because what you’re doing now is what you refused to do then – serve as smith for my brother.”

 _Cousin,_ a voice reminds her and she grimaces at the thought.

“Do you remember Acorn Hall?” he asks her quietly then as a ridiculous grin blooms on his face.

She swallows as heat rises in her cheeks, knowing it has nothing to do with being naked before him and everything to do with her memory of the two of them in that forge. 

“Yes,” she whispers. 

He looks at her and she watches as he hesitates, knowing he wants to close the distance between them, but that their nakedness is stopping him and he’s conflicted.

“Arya, I didn’t know it then . . .” he says, shaking his head, raising his eyes to hers, “but I fell in love with you there.”

She thinks he must have control of her heart then, the way it’s hammering away inside her chest as the pieces come together, realizing he became a stupid knight so he could have her and then she suddenly understands what that muddled feeling of hers is – the new one that only he stirs in her, the one that frightens her even more than the Others.

She’s fallen in love with him too. 

Her chest is tight. “Gendry Waters you are the stupidest, most stubborn, aggravating man I’ve ever met,” she tells him as a smile, the kind with a will of its own, tugs at her lips and she moves to close the distance between them.

He reaches for her bare shoulders to stop her, the waters still covering her body, and his palms feel hot on her skin compared to the frigid winter air as she glances at where they touch her skin.

She won’t be afraid of this, and she won’t let him be either.

She takes a shaky breath as she rises out of the water, her hands sliding up the back of his thighs and along the sides of his waist as she raises her eyes to his.

 _“Arya . . .”_ he warns, his voice hoarse, but whatever words he’s planned to say next seem to die in his throat as his hands slowly slip from her shoulders, his eyes following them as they graze the side of her ribs sending a shiver down her spine.

His fingers on her bare skin are bringing her body to life and the way he smiles softly at her reaction just makes her want him more as he finally closes the distance between them completely.

She can hear him breathe in when their bodies finally meet, his hands wrapping around her waist, pulling her against him, his arousal pressing against her belly, an answering ache growing between her thighs and she thinks she may die if she doesn’t chase it. 

“ _Arya,”_ he breathes, pressing his forehead to hers and her name sounds like one of Tom’s songs when he says it like that.

She cups his face then, whispering, “I’m in love with you too.” 

He pulls back slightly to look at her and she can tell he doesn’t quite believe her, but then his mouth is on hers in earnest, lips bruising, breaths mingling, sweet and tasting of wine. She feels his fingers brush against the nape of her neck, tangling in her hair, before they begin to trace the curves of her body, traveling to her hips.

She buries her nose in his neck, pressing her mouth there, breathing against his ear, _“I want you._ ”

He groans then as his hands wrap around her ass, lifting her and she grips her legs around him as he presses her back against the rock wall of the pool, his desire for her now pressed between her legs and she can’t help it.

She moans, breaking the kiss, panting, breathing and she can feel him smile against her neck as his fingertips graze her skin there, pulling her hair to the side, making her bite her lip. 

“I’ll never leave you again,” he whispers and the feeling of him, of their nakedness, these words . . . it has her body _thrumming_ and suddenly she’s trembling.

He pulls back to look at her then, their breaths heavy, his ribs touching hers a little more with each inhale, and his eyes don’t leave hers when he asks her, “Are you sure?”

She knows this is madness, that they are doomed, but she’s never been so sure of anything in her life.

She opens her mouth to tell him—

_“Me! You did nothing that day in the throne room.”_

They both freeze, eyes wide, at the sound of another voice in the godswood, _Sansa’s_ _voice_ , and she seems angry.

_‘What would you have had me do, little bird?”_

Sansa and _Clegane_ , sounding just as livid. Gendry and she exchange glances, uneasy, as he slowly lowers her.

She pulls Gendry down into the water with her and quietly drags him back toward a thicket of overgrowth, wanting to curse her sister for her impeccable timing, wondering what she is doing in the godswood, alone, with the Hound.

_“I expected you to stop him, Sandor.”_

Sandor? _Seven hells_ , Arya thinks as she glances at Gendry who is staring agape, a mix of amusement and surprise flashing on his face. 

She moves to glance around the thicket to see if she can tell where they are standing, but Gendry glares at her as his fingers grip her by the shoulders.

She glances at him over her shoulder to communicate her annoyance, but his eyes are closed and she can’t tell if he’s thinking of _her_ or eavesdropping on this conversation.

_“Joffrey would have had both our heads, girl.”_

Gendry presses his mouth to her shoulder, his beard grazing her skin, and Arya bites her lip.

_“I’m not a girl anymore, Sandor.”_

His fingertips brush against the skin on her neck as he pushes her hair to side and she shudders. She can feel his lips move against her ear, his breath hot on her neck as he murmurs, “Relax, Arya,” but she isn’t relaxing. She isn’t relaxed _at all_ as his hands travel down her arms and then to her waist, pressing her back flush against his chest.

 _“No. You’re not.”_ – a pause – _“You should have come with me when I asked.”_

She digs her fingers into Gendry’s thighs to keep from gasping as his lips find the juncture where her shoulder meets her neck.

_“I survived. Same as you.”_

She can’t stop the throaty breath she releases then when his fingers brush against her nipples as his mouth finds her neck, and when her back arches, her bottom pressing against his erection he chokes back a groan in her hair.

_“He didn’t help you survive, little bird. He raped you.”_

It is then that Arya’s attention is suddenly on the words coming from the Hound’s mouth and Gendry must notice too because suddenly his mouth and his hands still.

_“No he didn’t. What did you tell me once? ‘We’re all liars here and everyone one of us is . . .”_

The voices trail off, carried away on the wind, lost somewhere in the woods, but she knows Gendry had heard because his arms wrap around her waist as he presses a kiss to her shoulder that’s meant to soothe.

They remain still in their embrace for a long while, listening, waiting to move until they’re certain Sansa and the Hound are somewhere else in the godswood.

In her mind, she wonders bitterly, and for the first time, what it was exactly Littlefinger did with her sister during all those years she was away. 

***

He pulls her from her thoughts, turning her in his arms as she leans her head against his chest, her arms wrapping around his back and he can’t stop marveling at the way she feels, here, against him. 

He slides his fingers down her back, resting them at the base of her spine as she glances up at him, her cheeks flushed and his groin aching for her, suddenly remembering they are completely naked, but they both know the moment has passed as she shivers against him.

“Are you alright?” he whispers.

She nods, smiling sheepishly and something has clearly shifted between them now brought on by his confession so he cups her face, leaning down to kiss her, not lustful, like his kisses had been a moment ago, but meaningfully, in case he never gets to do this again.

When they return to the forge, he pulls her close.

“Sleep here tonight,” he murmurs, knowing it’s selfish to ask, but asking all the same because when the morning comes she’ll be gone and he has no idea how long it will be before he sees her again.

While they are lying there like this in the darkness, neither sleeping, him watching her as she watches him, the night quiet save for their breathing as her fingers trace shapes on his chest and his do the same on her back, he finally tells her. 

“I won’t be here when you return.”

Her brows furrow at first, confused, but then rise as she realizes why. “Jon asked you to go to Dragonstone.”

He nods solemnly, tracing his thumb across her cheek, his throat suddenly tight as she looks away, burrowing her head in his neck.

“Please come back,” she murmurs.

“We have to go to Qohor, remember?”

“You haven’t asked me,” she whispers and he knows she means about Braavos.

He kisses her hair. “Because you aren’t ready to tell me what happened there.”

“I will. Before we go to Qohor,” she tells him. She looks at him then, eyes grave. “But what I tell you Gendry . . . Jon can’t know. No one can. You knowing at all will put your life at risk. Do you understand?”

He nods, swallowing, as he wishes this woman he loves had never met Jaqen Hagar.

They are quiet for a long while when she whispers into his chest, “Promise me you’ll come back." 

He kisses her hair again as his arms wrap around her tighter. “Only if you promise to wed me when I do,” he whispers, trying to sound teasing, but instead his voice is thick and he knows he means the words.

She looks at him then and he expects to see her battling a grin, or angry, but her face is tender and her eyes still as she tells him, “After. In the Godswood.” 

 _After this war,_ she means, he knows, _after the Others._

“After,” he agrees, “in the godswood,” he whispers against her lips, intending to kiss her softly, but instead their lips move against each other’s with longing driven by the fear that there may never be an _after_.

Their fingers fumble at laces and hems then as he makes love to her right there in the forge.

He watches with Jon from the battlements as she rides away at dawn, thinking he’ll see her in only a few moons, thinking she’s his, but it will be two more long and terrible years before he sees Arya Stark again and when he does he’ll have a wife, but it won’t be her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for any typos. I didn't have much time to proof this. Thank you for such lovely comments. I'm so glad folks are enjoying this!
> 
> To my Gendrya fans: remain calm, this is not the end of their story. Promise.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me thinks the song The Night We Met by Lord Huron could be a good accompaniment for portions of this chapter . . .

*** 

“Are you going to wed the Smith?” Meera asks beside her as they walk between the soldier pines that line the Kingsroad. 

Arya halts her steps, rounding on her. She likes this woman, but she barely knows her and the question has Arya uncomfortable, so she gives right back. 

“Are you in love with my brother?” Arya had heard the fondness in Meera’s voice whenever she spoke of Bran. 

They’ve been trekking for a fortnight, her face nothing but numb since they left Winterfell, but Meera seems certain that they’re only five days from Long Lake now and Arya is glad for it. She may be of the north, but this is the first winter she remembers and her lungs are swore. She had no idea cold could be _this_ cold.

Meera smiles. “He’s my prince.” 

“Then why don’t _you_ wed _him_ and stop worrying about _me_.” 

Meera's smile turns upside down as she glances behind them, looking for the others, saying quietly, “He won’t tell me if we will. Sometimes I wonder if he doesn’t because he knows it won’t.”

The words leave Arya wondering what all Bran has told her.

Meera's confession leaves her feeling guilty. “You don’t need to wed someone to love them,” she tells her. 

Meera’s brows pinch, her face unsettled as she glances at her. “No,” she says sadly, “you don’t. But you should wed Gendry and go to Qohor when the time comes.”

“Did Bran tell you that or Jon?”

“ _I’m_ telling you that, as your friend.”

She snorts. “We aren’t _friends_.” 

Meera rolls her eyes. “No, but Bran told me we will be by the end of all of this. So why drag it out?”

Arya shakes her head then, chuckling a little at Meera’s directness, as she glances around the wood searching for the rest of their party, but they’ve all gone off to make water. She glances at the sky, frowning, having wanted to cover more distance before nightfall, and knowing now that they won’t. 

“Where are they?” she asks Meera, irritated. 

“Taking their bloody time about it. Make water my ass. They must be shitting,” Meera grumbles. “They aren’t the only ones who have to go.” 

Arya gives her a look. 

“What?” Meera says, giving the same look back. “You’re no better. I bet you have to shit too.” 

Yes, this woman was growing on her. 

“Your father told me the same, you know,” she tells her as their feet begin to move again, “that we’d be friends. He also said I needed to return to Essos, but . . . I wasn’t thinking Qohor.” 

“You know why it has to be there and why Gendry must be the one to go with you?” Meera says softly. 

 _Ichor and dragonsteel_. 

Arya swallows, wondering again if it was Bran or Jon who informed her. “I know.” 

Meera nods, hopping on her feet, shivering, cupping her hands to her mouth. “Where is your wolf,” she asks her, the words hanging in the air as she glances around, her head bobbing and weaving between the trees looking for Nymeria’s grey scruff. 

Arya shrugs. “Off hunting.” 

“She’s a maneater.” Meera says plainly, like it’s not an insult. “Have you been in her while she dined on men?” 

“She only dined on _Freys_ ,” Arya says, defensively. 

Meera doesn’t blink. “Still men.” 

“What do you mean _in her_?” Arya asks, confused.

“When you warg,” Meera says, looking at her strangely as if this is something Arya should know. 

“Warg . . .” she says slowly, the word familiar, but she can’t place from where as she scans the woods around them.

“You don’t know what a warg is?” Meera says, surprised.

“A warg?” she says absently, as her feet still. Something feels . . . _off._ “No . . .I . . .” she trails off.

 _These woods are silent,_ she thinks as she closes her eyes, listening.

 _Too silent._  

The cacophony of the wood is gone. Birds are no longer chirping and the insects have grown quiet. Even the wind doesn’t seem to rustle the pines. 

The hairs on the back of her neck rise then as she opens her eyes, exchanging a wary look with Meera. She feels it too.

Something is very wrong here, but she can’t yet sense what. Meera’s eyes though, they seem to be saying that she _can_ and they have Arya reaching inside her furs to draw the dragonglass dagger Jon had given her, the one she’d shown to Gendry, as her own eyes scan the forest for threats.

 _Fear cuts deeper than swords._  

Meera’s posture is tense as she pushes back her hood, adopting a crouch, one hand on her bow, the other reaching silently over her shoulder for a dragonglass arrow.

Unease slowly trickles into Arya’s blood then as her pulse begins to quicken and she adopts Meera’s same posture.

_How did you fight them north of the Wall? We didn’t. We ran._

They are crouched, hidden behind a snowdrift as Meera watches Arya back as Arya guards hers.

A lazy rustle comes then from the brush beyond Meera’s shoulder and when Arya sees what has made it, not five hundred feet from where they are, she inhales sharply, eyes growing wide, her body instantly wanting to _run_.

Meera’s back is turned, unaware of what’s stumbled on their path, but she must read the fear on Arya's face. 

“What is—” Meera starts to hiss, but the sound of branches breaking has her cutting off her own words, tensing, as Arya grows glad that Meera can’t see what she can.

_Female. Gods._

Two small brown cubs emerge, waddling close to their mother and Arya doesn’t dare blink or move now because Meera’s words have the sow registering their presence, her body brown, immense and grizzled, watching them, _evaluating_ them, assessing the threat they pose.

She knows they’re in trouble then, her heart pounding in her chest, and from the corner of her eye she can see Meera looking at her with concern because, she suddenly realizes, she’s trembling. 

“Don’t move,” she manages to whisper, speaking the words as firmly and as calmly as she can, but Meera sees the truth on her face, her eyes betraying her panic. 

Arya grimaces as the sow digs at the ground in front of her with massive four-inch claws, knowing all too well what they can do to human flesh. 

She remembers as a child when a Cerwyn had been attacked while hunting with her father. The party had pulled him through the Hunter’s gate where she’d been climbing with Bran and she’d never seen so much blood, not before or since, not with the Mountain, not even when she killed Raff. 

Four slashes had tore open the man’s furs and with it his abdomen, oozing blood and torn flesh. Arya could see the man’s _muscles_ where his groin and upper thighs had been, the skin flayed off, and though she was only five then she knew the man would die of his wounds. 

But it was the man’s scalp that had kept Arya awake that night and the night after that. It had been peeled back like the skin of an orange, hanging loose from his skull, flapping haphazardly like a banner flag. 

Her mind now quickly scans through a variety of solutions, realizing there are none. They’d been careless and foolish, too quiet in the wood and the sow had stumbled right onto their path.

A low, deep huffing sound comes from the sow’s snout then and Arya’s mouth turns bone dry while in front of her Meera glances at her, breathing heavy, eyes wide, but brows tight, her body tenser than her bowstring, because, Arya knows, Meera has realized the sound has come from a brown bear.

 _Cubs,_ Arya mouths to her between heavy breaths and Meera’s eyes snap to hers as she grasps the full magnitude of the situation they’re now in. 

The sow rears, pounding her front paws on the ground in front of her and Arya winces, trying to keep her eyes from meeting the bear’s. The sow would charge. 

Every instinct in her is screaming at her to bolt, logic fleeing from her mind entirely, and she moves to do just that, but Meera sees and grabs her furs at her waist with the hand that still has five fingers, gripping tightly, rooting her in place. 

Syrio’s words come to her again, but the voice in her head is Gendry’s now. _Fear cuts deeper than swords._  

“ _Stay calm_ ,” Meera hisses, her breathing uneven. The words are hot on Arya’s face. “How far?” 

“Too close for hilts or arrows,” she hisses back. 

The bear rears on its hind legs then, hammering the ground as a loud blow comes from her nostrils and a growl from her mouth. 

The sow begins to charge. 

She jolts toward them at a speed Arya can hardly fathom for a beast so large, her grizzled shoulders moving up and down with the power of massive muscles behind them. Arya reaches for Meera, pushing her backward into the snow so her body is covering hers, but as she does she spots Toregg emerging unexpectedly from the woods. 

The sow goes for him first, furious. 

She rears, her paws slamming into his chest, throwing Toregg’s body a good six feet into a snow drift. As Toregg tries to stand, the sow is already on him, his body slumping to the ground as the bear mauls him, dragging him swiftly and forcefully by the leg out of the drift.

Then the woods are silent, save for the cold indifferent grunts of a predator and the terrified screams of its prey. 

“Stay quiet, Toregg!” Arya hears Val shout from somewhere distant and the man does his best, but he’s moaning and whimpering, clearly in agony. 

A whistle travels past her ear then and Arya watches as Val’s arrow misses the sow. 

He’s trying to cover his head with his hands as the bear’s mouth maws at his scalp like it’s some sort of awkward honeycomb, detached about it, _silent_ , so silent that now all Arya can hear are the sounds of it’s teeth grating against Toregg’s skull as the bear paws at his spine, pushing his body into the snow, its nose buried red.

Bears weren’t like shadowcats, she knew. There would be no bite to the neck. The bear would kill him _slowly_ and if it ate him alive, it would do so clumsily. 

She doesn’t think then as her mind reaches out, clawing for the bear’s and _slips_ , with effort, into the sow’s skin. 

She sees Toregg’s backside first, his thigh mauled and raw like the meat she feeds Nymeria and his hair is somehow redder and matted with sticky blood as red rivers make pink snow where part of his shoulder muscles used to be. 

The smell finally hits her then. 

 _Toregg’s fear. Fear and something metallic._ It oddly makes her think of Gendry. 

She can taste his flesh in her mouth then and the gag she wants to make almost forces her from the sow’s skin. It reminds her of the Trident and the funny taste the waters had had when she’d been there with Yoren. _It’s the taste of bodies,_ Lommy had told her, _rotting upstream._

The bear is confused with Arya inside its mind, uncertain, halting, sliding to a clumsy stop. _Calm,_ Arya thinks to the bear, _calm as still water,_ as she tries to guide the sow away from them and toward her cubs crouched in the brush.

The sow is powerful though, _fierce_ and Arya revels for a moment in the feeling of her strength as the bear wrestles and thrashes, wanting Arya gone from her mind.

This was a different sort of power from Nymeria’s skin, something sacred and majestic and with the realization comes a sudden urge in Arya then to respect it, to _protect it_. 

 _She is of the old gods,_ she thinks _, and this is a skin I shouldn’t have entered uninvited._  

She suddenly feels . . . ashamed. 

 _Forgive me_.

She can smell other beasts then. _Nymeria,_ she thinks, as her mind is flooded with something thick that almost drives her from the skin.

The _sow’s_ fear.

But there is something else there too, something primal and powerful that shudders through her marrow and out her limbs as the sow turns to her cubs, her sole interest now being their survival and escape.

Arya’s no longer fighting for control as the sow overpowers her easily with concern for her young and pushes her, _violently_ , from her skin. 

She feels like she is falling until she opens her eyes and glances up, breathing heavy, her body still heightened. 

Meera is on top of her now, covering her, alert, still expecting an attack at any moment. 

Arya follows her gaze, tracking the bear as it dashes off into the brush, cubs rushing behind her. 

She places her hands on the woman’s shoulders. 

“She won’t be back,” she breathes, trying to explain, panting, her heart pounding in her chest, “Nymeria . . .” 

Meera’s startled by her voice and looks down at her confused.

“Are you alright?” she breathes, but she doesn’t wait for Arya’s answer. Her eyes travel back in the direction the bear had taken, scanning the brush for movement, before finally landing on Toregg’s broken body, bleeding out in the snow.

*** 

It takes a fortnight to reach Long Lake as they drag Toregg behind them on a makeshift trundle, branches scratching at his flesh, his furs stuck to his wounds.

At night while Toregg moans, writhing in agony, Arya and Meera huddle close, neither able to sleep, one thinking of Gendry, the other of Bran, both wishing they were somewhere else, anywhere but here. 

Wildlings pass them on the Kingsroad when they’re a day from Long Lake.

“There are dead things in the waters south of Eastwatch,” one of them tells Tormund, but he hardly hears he’s so troubled about Toregg. 

They stay at Long Lake for two moons while a wood’s witch tries to help Toregg recover.

 _He won’t,_ Bran whispers to her one night. 

Tormund watches, weeping, as Arya slides Needle into his son’s chest and they all watch as Toregg’s body burns. 

On the journey back they light fire circles each night taking turns keeping watch and she keeps Nymeria close.

***

When they return to Winterfell with Bran four moons later instead of one, Arya knows immediately that something awful has happened. 

Sansa is not smiling when they arrive at the gates and she’s alone, save for the Hound, who’s scowling, and the Lady Brienne, who’s pacing. 

“Where’s Jon,” is the first thing she asks once she’s dragged her sister to the Godswood, Brienne following with Bran. 

“Dragonstone,” Sansa says, wringing her hands. “And before you ask, Gendry is with him.” 

None of this is news to Arya and she doesn’t understand why Sansa seems so troubled. 

Footfalls crunching in the snow behind her cause her to turn. The Hound has tagged along, nipping at her sister’s damn heels, along with Meera on Bran’s. 

She turns back to her sister. “Why do you look terrified?”

But it’s the Hound who answers her. 

“You’ll want to sit down, wolf bitch.” He doesn’t wait for her to. “Your bastard brother stole a dragon. That Targaryen bitch came calling, seeking it back. Your smith left with her, along with all your fucking men for Dorne.” 

_Dorne?_

“Arya, Gendry . . . he’s—” Sansa starts. 

The Hound cuts her off and there’s an edge to his next words that unsettles Arya deeply. “She doesn’t need a sweet song, little bird,” he says rounding on Arya. “He left when the Dragon queen forced—” 

“Sandor,” Sansa snaps, but the hand she places on his forearm is delicate, intimate and Arya rolls her eyes. 

 _Seven hells._ What the fuck else has she missed? 

“Someone start explaining, _now_ ,” she snaps then, her annoyance with the two of them and their clipped answers growing by the second.

Meera steps forward then, placing a gentle hand on her shoulder as Sansa launches into a tale that Arya scarcely believes.

The Green, one of Daenerys’ dragons, arrived in the courtyard one night _screaming_. Jon had had no choice then. He’d had Davos open the parchment before the banners in the Great Hall. 

Sansa tells her then that Rhaegar _married_ Lyanna, that Jon is trueborn and heir to the throne that Cersei's bastard now sits upon. 

Daenerys, meanwhile, had appeared in Winterfell a fortnight later seeking her dragon, threatening fire and blood if it wasn’t returned. What she found instead was a very unwilling beast and two heirs to the Iron Throne which displeased her greatly given she was already at war with another, Aegon. 

Jon, meanwhile, had lost control of the North when the dragon landed. Half the banners had gone home while those that remained had pledged themselves to Sansa, who in turn forced them to pledge themselves to Arya. 

“Jon read Robb’s will,” her sister explains then. “The North is yours now until he returns.” 

But it’s unclear, Sansa tells her, if Jon’s even still King in the North. 

She’s shaking her head, trying to process what is happening to the North. There was no time for this. The Others were coming and Jon had just left. Why would Jon leave with a queen threatening war when the real war is north?

She turns to Bran then. “What is he doing?” she asks him.

“Trying to win her armies and dragons to our cause,” he answers. 

“Jon reached an uneasy truce with her,” Sansa explains, sounding dissatisfied, but Arya keeps her eyes fixed on Bran’s as she says the rest because he has the truth, she knows, more truth than any of the rest of them. “Aegon has Dragonstone and the Stormlands. If the north helps her take them back, then in return she’ll help Jon mine the dragonglass.” 

Bran inhales deeply shaking his head. “The path is set then,” he murmurs. 

“Dragonstone is an _island_ and the men of the Stormlands are already with us,” Arya says, aggravated, thinking of the defeated pile of men Stannis had left behind when he died. “Is he a fool? She has three dragons and three armies. She doesn’t need the _North’s_ help. We need _hers_.” 

“No,” Sansa explains, sounding as sour as Arya feels. “She lost most of her fleet when she sailed for Dorne and with it half her numbers.” 

Meera steps forward then, speaking urgent words. “And have they? Taken any of it back? How long ago did they leave?”

“Two moons,” Sansa says fretful, as she turns to Arya. “We’ve had no word for three weeks.” 

 _Is that all of it?_ She wonders then. She has a terrible feeling it isn’t given the way her sister is looking at her. 

“And Gendry? He left with them on this stupid journey to take it back, didn’t it?” she asks then, already knowing the answer. Of course he would. 

“Arya, he . . .” Sansa begins, pausing, shifting her eyes to the Hound.

Her stomach clenches. 

“Is he hurt?” She asks then, the words betraying her fear, but her sister is distracted, exchanging a glance with the Hound. “ _Sansa_ , is he _alive_?” she snaps, desperation in her voice. She almost shouts the words. 

It’s Brienne who steps forward to answer. “Yes, your grace, at least he was, last we heard.” 

 _Your grace?_  

The Hound is staring at her now, clearly wanting to say something vile to her, but something’s not right. He should be enjoying this. Yet instead he looks . . . she narrows her eyes, suspicious. 

“Why do _you_ look so miserable? You should be happy to be rid of him after what he did to your face.” 

“Because, girl, your smith fucking _wed_ her,” he says gruff, “Those were her truce terms.” 

For a moment she thinks she’s misheard. 

“What?” she breathes, but her voice sounds small and distant and not at all like her own as the space between her lungs collapses, pulverized, ground raw, raw as Toregg’s shredded body.

She shifts her eyes to Sansa’s. “They wed?” Her throat is tight.

She nods painfully. “In the Godswood.” 

The Godswood? It wasn’t even sacred to the dragon queen, with her Seven. But it was sacred to _her._  

She thinks she may be ill then. She hadn’t just given him her maidenhead; she’d given him the most vulnerable parts of her. 

How could he do this? 

 _How could he? How could he wed her? How could he?_  

 _I’ll never leave you again,_ he had whispered in the pools.

He’d left her once. She’d been a fool to think he wouldn’t do it twice. 

The five faces in front of her are all staring at her with pity and she feels _humiliated_ as a memory of Jeyne Poole calling her horseface slams into her mind. 

“Is she beautiful?” Arya asks absently then, feeling disgusted with herself for even asking, for being a stupid girl. 

She knew. She knew Daenerys Targaryen was rumored to be the most beautiful woman in all of Essos. Possibly the world. She’d seen the whores in Braavos pretending to be her with their stupid silver wigs and barely there fucking dresses. 

“Very,” the Hound tells her bluntly as Sansa gives him a look that could melt steel. 

 _He’s just like all the rest,_ she thinks then _, a stupid bastard bull, thinking with his cock, trying to ring some queen’s fucking bell. It’s nothing to me._

But she grimaces and her heart clenches and she struggles to breath. That was a lie. It was. It was _everything_ to her. 

“Her beauty is irrelevant,” Sansa snaps coldly at the Hound before turning to her and stepping forward to take her hands. “He didn’t want this Arya. He was . . . distraught. It was awful.” 

She laughs bitterly, taking her hands back, pacing. “Distraught? Being husband to Daenerys Targaryen?” 

“Arya, he will always be in love with you,” Bran says softly behind her then as if those words are supposed to somehow soothe her. Instead they arrive like a punch to her gut. 

And she feels ashamed then at how easily she fell for him. Not just once, as a girl, but again, as a woman grown . . . 

Sansa is glaring at Bran as she says, “What our brother is _trying_ to say is that he didn’t want to wed her. She coerced him, Arya.” 

“What?” she says, half listening, still pacing. 

Her sister takes her hands again. “Jon, the fool, made him a Barratheon and then Gendry made the mistake of telling her about you. She threatened to burn him alive if he didn’t wed her and when he refused she threatened to burn _you_.” 

She stares blankly at her sister. _Stupid, stubborn Bull_. Then she tries to bury her hurt and anguish in favor of logic.

It takes several breathes before she’s able to reason again, but when she finally can she releases her sister’s hands, fisting them in her hair, pacing again before the heart tree as she puts the rest of the pieces together, realizing there’s only one possible explanation for why Daenerys would do this. 

Ned Stark’s daughter and Robert Barratheon’s son. The progeny of an alliance that helped bring down the Targaryen dynasty. 

The Dragon queen would never stand for it if the tales Arya had heard about her were true. She’d done it in Meereen, taken a man to husband to neutralize the threat he had posed to her ambition. 

“A Stark and Barratheon together . . .” she finally murmurs, more to herself than to any of the rest of them. 

“Would threaten a foreign queen’s claim to the seven kingdoms,” Bran finishes for her. 

She looks at him with his grim mouth and solemn eyes, the truth plain on his face. 

He knew this would happen to her. 

She wants to go back then. She wants to go back to that night in the pools and wed him, like he’d offered to, but she’d been too afraid. 

 _After,_ she’d told him, _in the godswood._  

They wouldn’t be in this mess now if she’d just been brave enough to say _yes_ , to say _before_. Instead she’d acted like some craven woman, and afraid of what? Spending the rest of her days with a man that she loved? 

Words the Kindly Man said to her when she was a child rush forth in her mind then. 

 _You will be no one’s daughter, no one’s wife, no one’s mother._  

Meera must read her thoughts. “Be glad you didn’t wed him. If you had, she would have burned him alive.” 

She tries to smile at her friend for attempting to make her feel better, but all she feels is sick. Gendry was lost to her now. There would be no _after_. There would be no _this_. She should have known better. _They_ should have known better.

They had been doomed from the very start. 

But she can’t hold back the resentment that creeps inside her chest then. 

Jealous fingers wrap around her heart, contempt flooding her lungs, as she realizes he has had _moons_ now to move on from _this,_ from _her,_ and that he has spent all of them with his beautiful wife at his side, offering him her comfort. 

But she has no one. 

Even Jon Snow has left her.

The thought of him sends her temper flaring for different reasons now, but when she speaks the words are low and quiet. “She should have threatened to burn Jon.” 

Maybe this Dragon Queen was stupid. He was the true heir to her stupid iron chair.

_Not me. Not Gendry. Not us. _

Sansa coos her then in a voice that sounds like their mother’s. “He offered to wed her in place of Gendry, but she refused, offering instead to install him as a Targaryen warden in the North.” 

Sansa sounds as disgusted by that idea as Arya feels. 

 _There must always be a Stark in Winterfell,_ her father’s voice reminds her.

“And did he accept?” He better not have. She’ll kill him if he did. 

“No, but Arya she called him her . . . _family_.” Sansa adds, grimacing.

The word is poison.

 ** _We_** _are his family,_ Arya wants to scream and she _hates_ this dragon queen then, more than she even hates Cersei Lannister. Cersei had taken the lives of people she loved, but this dragon queen was taking all the someones she still had left, hoarding them, like some gluttonous siren. 

She’s furious then. 

For half a breath she considers stealing a face and killing her slowly along with all her dragons. 

 _The Guild would be more than willing to help me,_ she thinks, darkly, _the name I stole from the Many-Faced God would be forgiven a thousand fold._

She wants to laugh at the irony of it all because the name she’d stolen was the same name tormenting her now.

Targaryen.

Aegon fucking Targaryen. 

If she’d just killed him on Dragonstone then the island would be vacant and none of them would be South, fighting this woman’s stupid useless war. 

But then she remembers the reports they’d heard at Long Lake, the Others and that the woman has dragons, dragons that they _need_. 

She hears Sansa say Toregg’s name, dragging her from her thoughts as she glances at Meera. 

“A bear mauled him on our way north,” she tells Sansa flatly. “He died.”

Meera’s frank words pluck Arya right out of her self-pity and she feels nothing but guilt then. She was still breathing. Heartbroken, but breathing and Toregg wasn’t because of a rescue mission she’d advised to save a lost Stark.

Sansa blinks, startled, saying something about Tormund and Arya can hear the concern in her words, but she has larger ones as she remembers all her sister has told them. The concerns she heard north and now the concerns about the banners having gone home.

The Others will come for the North first and she couldn’t place hope in southern lords or kings or queens to come to their aide.

She can’t afford to be distracted with _this_ anymore, or with _him_ and what he’s done because what matters now, the _only_ thing that matters, is their survival and the people depending on Jon, and now her, to keep them alive, to keep them safe.

She’s embarrassed then and abashed by her behavior, loath to admit it, but realizing she’s behaved no better than Sansa did at her age.

 _Shame_ follows the embarrassment. 

Instead of fulfilling her duty to Jon, preparing for the wars to come, she had been off acting like some stupid silly girl, running around in the woods and dark halls, _kissing_ _boys_. 

 _Sleeping_ with boys _._  

No more. 

No more _boys_. No more _kissing_. No more _distraction_. 

 _I am a direwolf,_ she thinks, a _she-wolf._

_I am a Stark._

The Long Night was coming and she didn’t know what would come with it, but what she _did_ know was that she wasn’t going to be some stupid silly lovesick girl when they finally found out.

With that thought in mind her face transforms into that of a warrior – _a_ _predator_ – fierce and determined, ferocious.

She raises her eyes then to meet and hold the gaze of each and every person standing in front of her.

She wants them to know that even if they are on their own, they will defend the North. They will defend it until their hearts stop and their lungs give out, but they will defend it because she holds it now and she’ll be damned if it will fall while she’s the Stark in Winterfell.

Her eyes find Bran’s last. He nods, pleased, wearing a grin on his face that reminds her of the last time she saw Robb and she remembers then that she has that yet to do too – avenge her brother entirely, by taking Cersei Lannister’s golden-haired head.

Then she tells the Hound, Brienne and Sansa about the reports of the dead in the waters south of Eastwatch.

“South of the wall?” Sansa breathes.

Brienne glances at her sister as she says to her, “Your Grace, your brother needs to know. The dragonglass—”

“ _Fuck_ the glass,” Arya says then and Sansa and the Hound both flinch as Sansa takes a step back. “What we _need_ are the _dragons_ ,” she tells them, her irritation rising once again at being beholden to Daenerys.

They needed at least one for its ichor if they were going to make dragonsteel. 

Acid rises in her throat abruptly then as she realizes she will still need Gendry to serve as smith. She shakes the thought from her mind as another replaces it: the sow and what she had done with her skin, wondering if she could do that with a dragon too. 

Jon had stolen one. Why couldn’t she and end this war? 

“No!” Bran snaps then, reading her mind. 

Arya rounds on him, crossing her arms. “And why not? We’re _losing,_ Bran. Dragonglass daggers are not the way this war will be won. _You_ should know.” She narrows her eyes then. “The path is set? What does that even mean?” 

Bran frowns. “That remains to be seen.” 

Her anger flashes. “Speak plainly Bran. Is Daenerys going to help us or not? If she isn’t, I’ll take the blood myself.” 

Sansa is shifting uncomfortably, glancing between the two of them wary and clearly confused. “What—”

Bran slams his fist on the wood of his wagon. “You will not go near _any_ dragon, Arya,” he tells her with quiet rage, but it’s the panic in his eyes that has her uncrossing her arms, startled and taking a step back. He’s afraid for her. “Not for its blood. Not even for Jon. _If_ the time comes when we have need of it, _he_ will bring you the dragonblood.” 

She opens her mouth to retort, but shuts it as he shoots her an icy glare. 

They stare at each other in silence for half a breath and he looks as exhausted as she feels. 

“Fine,” she relents, “We’ll do it your way, Bran.” _For now._

“The North is Arya’s,” he says then, his gaze traveling to Sansa and the Hound. “My path is elsewhere.” 

“What?” Sansa says, stepping forward, stricken. “But you’ve only just arrived.” 

Sansa takes Bran’s hand, as Meera tells her. “He has to get to God’s Eye.” Her eyes shift to Arya’s meaningfully. “That is our priority.” 

Arya nods agreeing, but she won’t be the one taking him now as she’d planned. “Brienne, you will escort my brother there.” 

“Your Grace I’m sworn—” 

“Lady will do,” she tells Brienne tiredly. She didn’t know if Jon was still King, but she did know she wasn’t the Queen.

“With all do respect, your grace, your brother named you his heir, not Jon Snow and I swore an oath to your mother.”

Arya doesn’t want to argue the finer details of oaths and heirs right now. “Call me what you like, _Lady_ Brienne,” – the woman leans back pursing her lips – “but you will take my brother to God’s Eye. That’s an _order_.”

As the lady knight nods sullenly, a smell passes by her nose that makes her blood run cold. _Ginger and cloves._  

“A man can go as well,” a voice says behind her.

Before she draws another breath she turns, drawing Needle, as Sansa and Meera both take abrupt steps back.

Standing there are two men. One a fat man, the other a ghost, but she knows them both and she remembers exactly from where. 

“Cat?” the fat man says, smiling bewildered, but it’s the ghost who Arya doesn’t let out of her sight. 

“Are you here to kill me?” she asks, not caring who hears as the Hound glances between the two of them and Brienne draws valyrian steel. 

The Hound’s eyes are on the ghost as he pulls his lip between his teeth, spitting on the ground, saying, “This cunt said he knew you,” he explains, “showed up a fortnight past with the fat one.” 

The ghost crosses his arms looking at her. “A girl had many names on her lips." He glances at Clegane pitifully. "The hound was one,” he murmurs as his eyes shift back to hers and his are intrigued now, his smile curious, as he inclines his head. “Yet he lives.” 

She hears no question and instead asks her own, “Did they send you?” 

“A man knows a girl,” he purrs, shrugging, indifferent, but then his face is scolding as if he’s a teacher about to give her some lesson. “No One should know by now that a man cannot be asked to kill someone that he knows.” 

She narrows her eyes, straightening then, but her body is still coiled like a snake, ready to strike. “Then why is a man here?” 

“A man sees. A man hears.” He smiles wickedly. “And a man comes to my Lady of Stark now to offer his services.” 

***

“Tell me again.” Sansa asks her as they walk the battlements a fortnight later. 

“ _Sansa_ ,” Arya says, exasperated. 

“ _Arya_ ,” her sister replies in a mocking voice. 

She rubs her arms, wishing she were back inside, but Sansa had dragged her up here under some pretense about wanting to discuss the spacing of their guard stations, as if either of them knew anything about defending a castle. 

 _I’m an assassin,_ she thinks, _not a commander._  

She would ask input from the bannermen, but most had left along with her men. She’d begrudgingly turned to the Hound for advice. He’d at least fought at the Blackwater. 

Not that she planned to tell her sister that and not that it mattered because apparently _guard station spacing_ was code for _boy talk_.

“I already told you. He said you gave him a song,” she tells her, but when her sister’s cheeks flush, Arya raises a concerned eyebrow, adding, “He also said he’d fuck you bloody.”

Sansa halts her steps once they are out of earshot of the last station and they both gaze down at the villagers milling about the winter town as she asks the same question she’s asked fifteen times before.

“Those were his words? A song?” she says, as the winter wind whips her auburn hair around her neck, ignoring all of Arya’s last words completely, “A song?”

She rolls her eyes. “The man was dying, Sansa. I can’t remember exactly. But yes. He was thinking of you.”

“That will do,” her sister says, more to herself than to Arya, her face brightening before she puts on her Lady Stark face, the one that looks so much like their mother now, and says, “Now tell me about Gendry.” 

“Gendry?” she says, trying to sound indifferent, but battling a grimace instead. Thinking of him hurts too much now. “What of him?”

Sansa takes her hand. “He’s still in love with you.”

Arya pulls her hand back, gripping the crenulations as she leans her body away, arms extended and muscles taut, silently considering launching herself off the battlements if this conversation goes on a moment longer.

She settles instead for shooting her sister a withering look. “ _Sansa_.” 

“I want you to be happy,” Sansa says next to her. 

Not _all_ of the truth is there, she knows, but Sansa also means these words and when she registers her sad eyes, she knows she wants the exact same for her.

“Are _you_ happy Sansa?” 

Sansa’s lips try a smile, but her eyes don’t bother as she looks away and Arya’s heart begins to ache.

She bites the inside of her cheek, angry with herself for asking a question with such an obvious answer.

“Happy . . .” her sister says slowly, as if the word is foreign to her. “None of us are happy now, are we?”

She had hated Sansa when she was little, for favoring their mother, for gossiping with Jeyne Poole and excluding her, for never wanting to play Dragonknight or swim in the moat or sheepshit Theon, but this Sansa before her now is somehow worse.

A living reminder of all their family has lost – a reminder that her list is still too long. 

She wants to take away her sister’s pain, to end the people who have done this to her, to all of them. She _wants_ to be rid of this helpless feeling burrowing inside her chest, but Cersei Lannister is the cause and she’s far away in the south. 

So instead Arya offers her sister the one small thing she can right now in hopes it will bring her comfort, even if for only a moment. 

She talks with her about boys like Jeyne Poole use to do.

“Do you love. . . Sandor?” she asks and the name tastes like bile on her tongue, but she says it for Sansa.

“I was in love with a memory of him . . .” she answers, her eyes distant, a faint smile on her lips, “and I think I am not in love with a memory anymore.” She pauses then, fidgeting with something in her cloak, before she says, “Do you love Gendry?”

 _No,_ she thinks.

 _Yes you do,_ another voice answers.

Arya doesn’t tell her sister that and her sister doesn’t yield. 

“He took on a knight unprovoked in the yard _for you_.” 

Arya crosses her arms, spreading her feet wide and snorts. “If the Hound is a knight then I’m a princess.” 

“You _are_ a princess now.”

“And?” she says, irritated, waiting for the lecture as the wind whips her hair about and she pulls some of it from her mouth, wondering how Sansa’s seems to always remain so perfectly in place. “Where is he?” She makes a sweeping motion with her hands, but she isn’t sure what _he_ she’s referring to, Jon or Gendry. “They aren’t here. They made their choices and mine with it. We cannot go back. So what does any of it matter now?”

Sansa reaches inside her cloak then, pulling out a small scroll. “Gendry gave me this before he left.” 

She holds it out to her, but Arya doesn’t take it. Gendry doesn’t know his letters. He barely knew how to read when she’d left him. 

She eyes the parchment, suspicious. “Who wrote that?”

Sansa frowns as the hand holding the scroll falls to her side. “Arya,” – she says her name the way their mother use to when Arya was sad, soft and tender, but she won’t cry, not for herself and not for him – “He had me write it. He’ll return and it will be for you.” She holds out the scroll again. “You should read this before he does.”

“No,” she says bluntly, not allowing herself even one moment to hope those words might be true. She looks at her sister disappointed, worried she hasn’t yet learned the lesson she’s about to tell her. “People who leave don’t come back, Sansa.” 

“You left and came back,” Sansa points out. 

Arya is quiet for a few breaths before she replies. 

“No,” she tells her. “Arya Stark left,” she murmurs, “But it was someone else who came back.” 

***

Arya is a witness when Sansa marries Clegane in the godswood a moon later and three moons after that, as they receive reports from Tollett that five castles on the Wall have had the pox roll through them, her sister announces she’s with child. 

She made a face when she learned the Hound was to be her good brother, unsure how she felt about this man she thought to be terrible joining her pack, but the face she makes at the thought of him as a father is even worse and she wonders what in seven hells Sansa was thinking by not drinking moon tea. 

But when her sister tells her she’s to be an aunt mostly what she thinks of is Old Nan. 

 _Women smothered their children rather than see them starve_ . . . she hears the old woman saying.

“Isn’t she scared?” Meera asks her one morning in the yard as they’re training a group of winter town youth.

“Not as scared as she should be,” Arya replies, as her eyes shift to the covered bridge. Jaqen is seated there, a knee drawn to his chest, watching her. 

He’d come from Oldtown with Sam, bearing ancient tomes and a glass candle. The tomes contained passages about the Long Night, but it was the candle that interested Arya more. 

She’d seen one only once before. In the House.

She had snuck into his bedchamber her first night back and straddled him, one hand clamped over his mouth the other holding a dagger to his throat, demanding to know if he had a contract for her. 

He had _let_ her come in of course. He knew she would come. 

 _A man is like a girl,_ he had said, the words soft as silk, his face calm as still water, while the dagger beaded blood at his throat, _a man is not No One anymore._  

 _You’re lying,_ she’d hissed in his ear and he was, she’d seen it in his face, a face that, she now knew, was not even his. 

 _A man is mistaken,_ he’d whispered then, explaining away his lie, as his hands had slid up her thighs. _A girl becomes a **woman** _ and then the lie was on his face no more.

She’d felt _aroused_ then, and in one swift motion Jaqen’s hands had gripped her waist and reversed their positions, the dagger still pressed to his throat. 

 _A woman desires a man,_ he’d murmured, his face so close to hers that she’d smelled the honey on his mouth _,_ their noses touching as he breathed her in and that’s when she had registered his desire for her too, pressing there, between her thighs. 

 _I’m done with kissing boys,_ she’d reminded herself then as she exited the room.

But another voice had answered. _Jaqen’s a **man** . . . _

“I don’t like that man,” Meera says, following her gaze. 

“Why?” Arya asks, her eyes still on Jaqen. 

“He stares at you too long,” she answers. 

“You haven’t asked how I know him,” Arya replies. 

“I don’t have to,” Meera says and Arya can hear the disinterested shrug in her words. 

Arya turns to her then and rolls her eyes as Meera lets loose an arrow. “Did Bran tell you everything?” 

“Not everything,” she says, her voice suddenly grim as the arrow misses her target. Her aim has suffered with the tips of two fingers gone. “He won’t tell me about us.”

There was a silent understanding between the two of them. Meera being in love with her brother was something that they rarely discussed. So her mentioning it now has Arya sheathing her sword turning to her friend, worried for her.

“Does he only tell you good things?” Arya asks her. 

Meera relaxes her bow arm, staring at her over her shoulder, frowning. She’s quiet for a few breaths as her face melts into a grimace that has Arya regretting ever asking. 

“No,” she finally says, “He’s told me what I can only imagine is the worst of it.” 

“But you can’t tell me.” It wasn’t a question. 

This was another part of their friendship that was simply understood. Whatever Bran had told Meera was also why she was here, with her, and not on the Isle of Faces, with him, where they both knew she wanted to be more.

“You’ll see him again,” Arya tells her. 

“I will,” Meera says, confident as she drops her bow arm again and shifts her gaze to the Godswood, but when she glances back at Arya her face is withdrawn, “just not before they come.”

Arya knows this is one of Bran’s secrets, something Meera isn’t supposed to tell her, but she’s offering it to Arya anyway because she trusts her and more than that, Arya knows, her friend is scared, carrying half of Bran’s secrets all on her own. 

“Sometimes when you look at me I think you see the world ending, Meera Reed,” she says then. 

“No,” Meera replies, smiling sadly, “not ending. Beginning.” 

***

Sansa is seated next to her near a hearth in the Great Hall as they review Winterfell’s winter stores, both of them frowning, when a raven from Jon finally comes. 

> _We’ve taken the Stormlands. Aegon is with us. Dragonglass weapons in route in two moons. Sending a smith as well to oversee Castle Black’s forge. - Jon_  

“That’s all he has to say?” Arya says as she tosses the scroll into the flames and leans back in her chair, crossing her arms, wondering if the smith is the one smith she knows. 

“I’m sure he’s just busy,” Sam says, in his mothering voice, smiling. It makes Arya grind her teeth as she props her feet up on the high table glowering. 

Sansa is scratching Nymeria behind the ears as she shoots her boots a disapproving look, but Arya leaves her feet right where they are.

“ _Busy_ ,” she mutters, fisting her hands, her nails digging into her palms.

“You know . . . mining the glass . . . making the weapons,” Sam chirps.

The heads of both Stark sisters turn at once, glaring at him with knives and he shudders backward half a step.

“I doubt he’s mining anything,” Sansa hisses. 

“And he’s no smith,” Arya adds. 

 _He has a new pack now,_ she thinks bitterly. _A pack of dragons._  

“Well, he may have Kingly matters to attend to then,” Sam says, “but the raven isn’t why I’m here. I’ve come to ask on Lady Sansa about the babe. Everything well?” 

Sansa’s scowl fades at once, replaced with a soft smile. “He’s moving quite a lot now,” she tells him, shifting uncomfortably in her seat. 

Sam gives her a cheerful nod before he tells her to come to the turret tomorrow and takes his leave.

The maester says Sansa has three moons to go, but if her sister’s swollen belly is any indication, she has far less than that and Arya suspects Sansa’s child was conceived well before her wedding night.

“He?” Arya asks, hopeful.

Sansa shrugs. “Just a feeling.” 

“I’d like a nephew,” Arya tells her with enthusiasm.

Sansa chuckles, glancing at her sideways in mock suspicion. “Why? Afraid you’ll be stuck with a niece who likes to sing songs and wear dresses and do needlework?” 

Arya snorts. “I’ll teach her all she needs to know about _needlework_.” 

Sansa reaches for Arya’s hand then and places it on her belly where her niece or nephew is moving. 

“Seems whoever is in there agrees,” her sister says with a smile, but her smile dies at some memory. “I’m worried about Jon. She’ll march on the Neck finding some way to trap him.”

The _she_ Sansa is speaking of, Arya knows, is Cersei. Tommen had died of winter fever two moons ago, Cersei taking the throne for herself. 

“If she marches there, I’ll send Brienne south to parlay with the Kingslayer,” she tells her. 

But it’s the ice in Sansa’s next words that leave Arya turning to her sister pleased. 

“When this war is over, I want you to take her, Arya.” The words are cold steel. “I want you to bring her here,” she whispers. “And after I’ve spat in her face, the two of us, together, will show her what winter brings.”

***

She’s dreaming of Nymeria a moon later, running with Ghost, when Sam rattles her awake one night. 

“Two ravens,” he says in a hushed whisper, holding out the first. “From the Wall.”

She pushes herself up, surprised when she finds Val and Meera in the room too.

_Dark wings, Dark words._

She takes the scroll from Sam’s hand, squinting as she unravels it. He hands her a candle as she begins to read the script that she’s now come to recognize as Commander Tollett’s hand. 

> _Lady Stark,_
> 
> _Wights spotted outside Castle Black with increasing frequency. Can be seen without looking glasses from atop Wall. Do not come in force. Seem to be testing defenses. Similar reports from Eastwatch, Shadow Tower and six others. Send men you can spare. Those six have the least. –Tollett_  

“I want the names and locations of those six castles and ask if the Vale has made good on that food shipment yet,” she tells the maester, before turning to Val, “I assume the ‘send men’ part is why you’re hear?”

“I can spare three hundred men and women, but it will mean less defending Winterfell. I’ll lead them there myself.” 

“Do it. Leave Tormund behind,” she tells her. 

The red-bearded wildling was one of only three people she knew who had fought the enemy at all. The second was off gallivanting in the south with his new family while the third was standing before her, staring at her with his round rosy cheeks, holding out the second raven as if he half expected her to growl at him. 

She snaps the paper from his hands wondering how exactly Samwell Tarly managed to kill an Other when he couldn’t even protect himself from Bravos. 

> _Jon has made a decision, shifting the path in ways I didn’t expect. Qohor will be vital now Arya. You know what to do. When Jon comes, be ready. –Bran_  

She hands it to Meera to read as she turns to Sam. “Write back. Ask what decision and when Jon will be bloody coming,” she says, not bothering to hide the anger in her words. 

Wights now march on the Wall, but for nearly eight moons Jon Snow has been distracted in the south, fighting someone else’s wars. 

When both Val and Sam have left she blows out the candle to conserve the wax and turns to Meera, asking, “What Tollett described . . . how bad is this?”

Meera is wiping sleep from her eyes when she answers, “A flea bite. Barely the beginning.”

But none of Meera’s words melt away the tension in her belly and instead it only grows.

 _How did you fight them north of the Wall? We didn’t. We ran._  

“What the fuck has he been doing down there all this time?” 

“Falling in love, I imagine,” Meera says absently with a yawn. 

Arya shifts her eyes to hers. “ _Falling in love_?” She asks watching her friend closely, wishing then that she hadn’t put out that candle so she could read her face. “I was talking about _Jon_. Who were _you_ talking about?” 

In the darkness of her bedchamber a silence stretches between them. 

“Gendry,” she finally answers and Arya can’t tell if it’s a lie. 

***

Sansa’s babe comes _early_ (according to Sam) and when the sun rises and sets only to rise again with Sansa still in labor, Clegane growling threats at Sam and the Maester fretting over the position of the babe, Arya and Gilly shove him aside, telling him to take a seat. 

She’d worn the face of a midwife for a time in Braavos and seen too many bastard babes delivered inside the brothels besides. Gilly had seen even more and given birth to two. 

Sansa is exhausted, sweating and red faced, and Arya isn’t sure if she even has enough strength left to push anymore when she softly tells her sister, “We have to turn him, Sansa and it will not be pleasant.” 

But Sansa doesn’t whimper. 

Instead her sister’s face grows fiercer somehow and she remembers the sow then, the strength she felt while inside her skin, worried for her cubs. 

As Arya sheds her jerkin, she thinks her sister is one of the strongest women she knows. 

When the babe finally enters the world two hours later it isn’t a _he_ , but a _she_ , with Tully eyes like her mother and the brown hair of her father. 

Her scream though, her scream is all _Stark_ and Arya couldn’t be prouder as she hands her to her mother.

They name their daughter Catelyn and Arya knows she doesn’t stand a chance against this little niece because she’ll love her even if she’s just like her mother and never wields a sword.

As she quietly pulls the oak door closed, Gilly leans in with a smile to whisper, “You’ll be next.”

Arya forces a polite smile as a knife twists in her gut and the girl walks away.

 _You will be no one’s daughter, no one’s wife, no one’s mother._  

 _Old_ jealousies bubble in her blood then, from when Sansa and her were girls and she envied her beauty, but there is also a _new_ one now tied to what Sansa has inside that room, what Arya can never have and it’s bitter and stinging because she didn’t even know she wanted it until now. 

“A woman is jealous,” Jaqen says behind her as he steps from the shadows. 

She doesn’t turn as she asks the same question she’s asked him each day since she returned. “Are you here to kill me?”

It’s not until his fingers graze her neck, brushing her hair to the side, that she realizes he’s moved. 

“A woman is no longer no one.” 

“No,” she agrees, a sour taste in her mouth, like the warm milk the Kindly Man had given her once, like the taste of dragon ichor. “But a girl was, for a time, and a girl’s decisions have become a woman’s consequences.” 

“Is a woman ready to make another sacrifice?” 

Her mind turns to Qohor then, a pit opening in her belly, her mouth grimacing at what she now must prepare to do before she goes there, unsure if the bile in her throat is because she must do it all or because she must do it with Gendry.

She ignores his question asking her own instead. “Have you teased it out of Sam yet? Can he build it or must we find another way?”

His mouth is so close to her ear that she can feel his lips move against it as he purrs, “A man has shown him the plans. Samwell Tarly can do it, but he will need a man’s help.”

“Then lead him the rest of the way,” she breathes. “When Jon returns, it needs to be ready.” 

 _Whenever that will be._  

“A woman should use the candle if she wants to know what a man is doing in the south,” he murmurs and she can hear the admonishment in his words.

She pulls her neck away before his mouth can claim it and turns to face him. “The candle isn’t even burning, Jaqen.”

His displeasure is plain on his face as he steps closer, placing his hands on her hips, leaning close to whisper, “If a woman desires it, she could light it.” 

The way he says the words tells her they aren’t talking about just the candle now. 

“Maybe you _want_ me to use it so the House can find me,” she whispers. 

“The House doesn’t need the candle to know where a woman is.” She can hear the clever smile on his face in his next words when he says, “Does a king know a woman plans to sacrifice his dragon?” 

She pulls away from him then. 

“We aren’t going to sacrifice _his_ ,” she tells him. She smirks. “We’re going to sacrifice _hers_.”

***

The moon turns.

> _Lady Stark,_
> 
> _Received first dragonglass shipment. My thanks. We’ve outfitted men at five castles with it. Can Jon spare more? The days grow shorter here. –Tollett_
> 
>  
> 
> _Lord Commander Tollett,_
> 
> _A second shipment is on route to Eastwatch. Will send word to Jon. Only six hours of daylight here each day. Have Others been seen at the six castles yet? –Arya Stark_
> 
>  
> 
> _Lady Stark,_
> 
> _Only wights at the six, but their numbers grow each passing moon. Giants have been spotted at three now too. When will Jon return? –Tollett_
> 
> _Tollett,_
> 
> _Giants? Dead giants? At least they don’t have an ice dragon. Jon will return when the dragonglass mining is completed. Third shipment of dragonglass left White Harbor on the new moon. –Arya Stark_

The moon turns once more.

> _Lady Arya,_
> 
> _Dead giants. A new recruit says Jon has a dragon. Is it true? Tell him to send the beast here. I could use a nice fire. My luck I’ll be the lord commander when an ice dragon arrives instead. Haven’t had a good smith here since Donal Noye, but Jon sent one built like a bull. Says he knows you? Give Jon my thanks. –E_
> 
> _E,_
> 
> _It’s true. A green one, though I haven’t seen it. Have had reports of dead things in the water fifty miles south of Karhold. They do not come on land. Why? I know the Smith. He’s stubborn. Steer clear of his temper. –A_
> 
> _A,_
> 
> _Received third shipment of glass. Thenns at Rimegate loosed several arrows a fortnight past on wights for sport. Can Jon spare more? We won’t be going below to retrieve those arrows once they’re spent . . . Wights south of Karhold? Might be the Wall keeping them in the water. What does Sam say? He always has his nose buried in a book. –E_
> 
>  
> 
> _E,_
> 
> _Last shipment of glass lost north of White Harbor. Seas are starting to freeze over. When the waters freeze south of the wall, what happens to the wights in water, Edd? Sam doesn’t know. Will tell Jon to forge more arrows. –A_
> 
>  

The moon turns again.

> _Arya,_
> 
> _The seas must be freezing over if Sam the Slayer doesn’t know. Tell Jon I found Pyp, he’s still uglier than a horse’s ass, and somehow his ears have grown even bigger. Maybe that will get him to visit his black brothers on the Wall. –E_
> 
> _Edd,_
> 
> _Banners are restless. Sending 150 men to you. Distribute, as you like. Half are green southerners. Sam says the wights often return to the homes they had when they were still human. Is that true? Sent word to Jon of Pyp, but haven’t had any reply. Got any other ideas? –A_
> 
> _Arya,_
> 
> _Reports of Others at Westwatch, Hoarsfrost, Rimegate, Nightfort, Deep Lake, Long Barrow, Torches. Only sightings. Sam tells it true. Many a black brother turned wight come up to the gates of Castle Black. We put arrows in ‘em. The smith has a temper you say? I’d rather face dead giants than Lord Gendry’s hammer! He bloodied Allister Thorne’s face over a ‘King Snow’ jest. Tell Jon. He’ll like that. –E_
> 
> _Edd,_
> 
> _How many Others? Why those castles? What do they do when they come? Lord Gendry? Of what? He wasn’t a lord of anything when I knew him. Tell me the jest. –A_
> 
> _Arya,_
> 
> _Only come in groups of two or three, never more. Only at night. Stick close to the trees. Don’t know why. Could be to watch us. Count our numbers, the watches. . . The forest has grown close to the wall at those castles too. Where do they go during the day? The jest is not fit for my lady’s ears. –E_
> 
> _Edd,_
> 
> _Sam says they sleep under snow. If we find them in the day we can kill them while they rest. But, how do we find them? I traveled the Kingsroad with Yoren for moons. If you knew him and ever heard his jests, you can certainly tell me this one. –A_
> 
>  

Another Moon.

> _  
> Arya,_
> 
> _Don’t know how we’d find ‘em. They’ve been here all along, I suspect. So has the N.W., but none of the commanders come before found ‘em in the day and I doubt I will either. Lord Gendry was in his cups the other night . . . said Jon’s in love with his wife. Suppose that explains why he’s not returned. Aye, Yoren was a dirty bastard. I’ll tell you the jest when you visit the Wall. –E_
> 
> _Edd,_
> 
> _Received word from Jon. He’s in the Riverlands with Daenerys. It’s not going well. You would think with three dragons this war would be ended by now. In love with her? The Queen? But she’s Lord Gendry’s wife. It can’t be. She’s Jon’s family. You’re sure that’s what he said? –A_
> 
> _Arya,_
> 
> _Jon needs to return north with men. I’ve got wights massing in force at nine castles. Others still only sightings, but more each day. Got Lord Gendry in his cups again to be sure. Aye, the dragon one. Says his marriage is a farce. Said some other things too . . . things about you. –E_
> 
> _Edd,_
> 
> _What nine? I’ll send what men I can spare to each, but the Lannisters are marching for the Neck, Edd. Tried to get another food shipment to Eastwatch, but the waters are mostly frozen north of the Dreadfort now and they had to turn back. Will try again in a fortnight. Jon will return. He will. I’ll make him. If he doesn’t come back soon I’ll find him myself and stick my knee between his legs to make him come. What things? –A_

 

The moon turns new.

> _Edd,_
> 
> _Some terrible sickness has come to Winterfell. May be unable to send ravens for a while. Sam will send replies. –A_
> 
>  
> 
> _Arya,_
> 
> _Sam tells me the sickness is winter fever. Are you well? Is Jon back yet? Sun don’t rise ‘til just before midday now. Tell Jon that Grenn came to the gate at Castle Black three nights past. Pyp put him down with a dragonglass arrow. It was a nasty business. –E_

***

The moon turns.

> _Arya,_
> 
> _Others spotted in growing numbers near three castles – Westwatch, Nightfort, Deep Lake. At least a hundred at each. Why only those three? Has Jon returned? He must. Now. Be safe. Please be well. –Edd_

She has never met Edd Tollett, but they’ve corresponded so frequently now that she can _feel_ his alarm bleeding off the scroll between her fingers.

She’s in the maester’s turret with Sam and reaches for a piece of parchment and a quill to scribble quick words of reply.

> _Edd,_
> 
> _Will research what we can. How many men at the three? What are they doing? Testing defenses? I’m well, but many are not. I’ve called the banners for a strategy council on the next harvest moon. Most are fools still in disbelief. If the snows aren't too deep your presence would be welcome. Tell Lord Gendry he must attend by whatever means necessary. Told Jon about Grenn. Have had no reply. I’m sorry about your friend. –A_

Then she scribbles harsh words to Jon.

> _Your Grace,_
> 
> _Others spotted massing at three castles. Return. The North has need of you. Are you still King in the North? You should be at this council, but I’ll lead it if I must. The Lannisters are at the Neck. Are you going to help our banners? Is your mistress? Cat has the sickness. –Lady Stark_

She gives Tormund Edd's scroll to read. "When you were North of the Wall did you see them in those numbers?"

Tormund eyes the scroll, holding it out in front of him curiously. "Never learned how to make paper talk to me," he tells her handing it back.

She reads it to him. "No," he replies, dread in his voice. "Never like that. Never in force."

She feels dread too.

 _Fear cuts deeper than swords,_ a voice that sounds like Gendry's reminds her then and the wound that she thought healed from losing him is cut open fresh inside her chest. She grimaces, shaking him from her head.

She hands the replies she wrote to Sam, asking him, “Why three castles? Why only three?”

“Westwatch makes sense. It’s a ruin and not protected by the Wall.”

“But the Nightfort and Deep Lake?” There was no pattern to it that she could see.

“The Nightfort was the first castle,” Sam reminds her for what feels like the millionth time, “I was there once with Bran,” he adds before he launches into the tale about the weirwood gate he passed through.

Arya shares a withering glance with Meera and Gilly, who both roll their eyes as if they hadn’t been there with Sam too. 

She cuts him off, turning to Brienne. “I want you to ride for the Neck. I’ll send word ahead to Howland,” she pauses to look at Sam, who reaches for a blank scroll as Brienne rises, looking ill at ease. 

“Your Grace, I swore an oath—” 

“And you’ll be upholding it if we stop one of the fronts of this war. Otherwise we’ll all be dead come summer. Ask for a parlay with the Kingslayer and try to talk sense into him.”

Hours later, once the others have all left and only Sam and her remain, flipping pages in tomes, searching for more on Deep Lake, her eyes having trouble staying open, she turns to him, asking, “Is it because he’s in love with her? Is that why he’s not here?”

“Jon always comes back. He wouldn’t abandon us,” but Sam is frowning, his face troubled and Arya knows he’s having doubts. 

 _How did you fight them north of the Wall? We didn’t. We ran._  

Ghost and Nymeria are curled together on the floor, Nymeria asleep, but Ghost’s eyes are open and sad, trained on her, as if to say, _maybe he has abandoned you. He abandoned me._  

“No,” she whispers, more to Ghost than to Sam, “Jon wouldn’t abandon us.” 

That didn’t make her feel any better though. What had happened in the South that had him so distracted? His ravens were terse and few, revealing nothing. She was supposed to be his Mistress of Whisperers. Instead she felt like his Lady Wife, running his Keep, while he was off playing at war and bedding some other man’s wife.

Later, when she returns to her bedchamber, Jaqen is there, seated on the windowsill, a knee drawn to his chest, watching the yard. 

“Perhaps a woman should ask the candle about the castles,” he suggests. 

“The House has a candle,” she reminds him.

“A woman should be in Essos. Lord of Reed told a woman to go there, yet a woman stays. Why?” She presses her mouth into a tight line as she wonders how Jaqen even knows about her conversation with Howland Reed.

“How long have you been following me?”

Jaqen’s gaze is still on the yard when he answers. “A woman should know. A woman should see. A woman should hear. But instead a woman grows careless. So a man sees. A man hears. A man does the rest.” 

She understands then. 

“How many assassins have they sent?” 

He steps down from the windowsill and moves toward her. “A man gave the Many-Faced God five.”

 _Five._ That’s four more than she expected.

She sits on her bed. “Why aren’t they after _you_?” 

Jaqen steps closer and kneels in front of her so their eyes are level and though the room is dark and she cannot see his face she hears him mocking her with his next words. 

“A man is not as cavalier as a woman is.” 

She crosses her arms, glaring at him even though he can’t see her face either. “Liar. I’m not cavalier.”

Jaqen places his hands on her knees. “A man is not _reckless_ with his _life_ like a woman is,” he corrects. 

Jaqen has the truth of it, she knows. She _had_ grown carless since returning to Westeros. She had not been nearly as vigilant as she needed to be. 

“Will the House send more?”

“Lovely girl. The House always wins. Why didn’t a woman give the Many-Faced God the name?”

She doesn’t answer. Instead she asks. “Does the House know what I want?”

“What the House knows a man knows not, but a woman, a man knows, desires to perform the ritual,” Jaqen says, as his hands press on her knees, spreading her legs apart, and he positions his body between them. 

She opens her mouth to retort only a fool would _desire_ to perform the ritual, but his hands traveling up and in along her inner thighs leave the words dying on her tongue and an ache growing between her legs. 

He inclines his head as he grips her thighs and leans in closer, so close that his nose is in her hair and she can feel his lips moving against her neck when he murmurs, “What else does a woman desire?”

One of his hands slowly slides up between her thighs.

“A man,” she breathes and then his mouth is on her neck as her head falls back and he pulls her by the hips to the edge of the bed, his own hips pressing forward to meet them. 

He’s solid and hard between her thighs, but she wants more so she wraps her legs around him, seeking more friction as his mouth takes her ear between his teeth. 

Her hands bury themselves in his hair as he undoes her jerkin, tearing it off, cupping her breasts through her tunic with both hands. She takes in a breath as he pinches a nipple and her hips tighten around him. She slides her hands down his back, her palms slipping beneath the waist of his breeches, fingernails digging into his bottom, pulling him closer still. 

When she reaches for his laces, his other hand is already expertly undoing hers.

“Naughty girl,” he purrs against he neck as he slaps her hand away. “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” he says, waving a finger back and forth in front of her lips. “A man desires to pleasure a woman first.”

And it’s only then that his mouth comes anywhere near hers as he sucks her bottom lip between his teeth. _Hard._  

He tugs her breeches off and then one of his palms, warm and callused, cup her between her thighs, over her smallclothes, as two fingers sneak under the cloth and dip beneath her folds. 

“A woman _does_ desire a man,” he purrs against her ear as he lifts off her tunic. “Lie back.”

She obeys, eyes closed, as he kisses her inner thigh and presses his mouth between her legs, kissing her there, over her smallclothes before his fingers pull them down, slowly trailing along her hips, her legs, her ankles, his mouth following close behind.

She bites her lip, unsure what comes next because she’s only ever been with one man like this before, but as his mouth begins to move against her and her hips jut forward, she knows whatever comes next is something she _needs_ to have or she will be in agony. 

She feels as though her whole body is barreling down a tunnel toward some sort of oblivion, budding and rising and threatening to explode inside her with each passing second.

When his thumb and forefinger pebble one of her nipples, she moans a name, falling over the cliff, diving over the edge, _falling, falling, falling_. 

But the name she moans is not his. 

 _Gendry_.

She opens her eyes then, boneless, panting, wanting to do it again, wanting it to be his body and his hands and his mouth pressed between her thighs. 

But he isn’t there and neither is Jaqen. 

Only herself.

She’d made Jaqen leave after he’d told her she _desired_ to do the ritual. 

She rolls to her side then and stares at the door, wishing for a knock and wanting Gendry to be the one on the other side of it.

But he’s at the Wall and she’s not his and she knows the knock she wants will never ever come.

She rises then to do the same thing she’s done for moons now.

She seeks out Jaqen for pleasure instead.

***

She’s in her father’s solar with Sansa, Meera and Clegane, when the early snows of the first true blizzard begin to fall. He’s got Cat in his lap, recovered from the sickness – _thank the gods –_ her little legs perched on his lap as he bounces her and she slaps his cheeks with her tiny hands, her face full of glee.

Moments like this one are rare, where the hard man who was made that way by hard choices disappears, but when they come Arya can only gape at the Hound and wonder at the miracle her sister and niece have somehow worked on him.

“You’re going soft, Clegane,” she tells him with a raised eyebrow as she scratches Ghost’s ears.

He ignores her, rising to hand Cat off to Sansa, telling his wife, “Going to walk the battlements before the snows get too deep.” 

Beside her, Ghost rises suddenly, his posture alert and she stares at the direwolf, uneasy as she follows his gaze. It’s trained on Sansa. 

Her eyes are tired as she takes her daughter from her husband’s hands and he leans in to kiss both their cheeks, Arya making a face, still uncomfortable around these little displays of affection between her sister and Clegane, still ill at ease with this man who killed her friend now being her family. 

Cat isn’t happy about it and squirms in her mother’s arms, crying out for her father as he leaves. 

“He’ll be back,” Sansa coos to her daughter. 

Arya feels Meera’s eyes on her then and turns. “What is it?” she asks, alarmed because Meera’s eyes are _sad_ and almost shining. 

“Listen,” she says in a raspy whisper and the words sound almost choked as Arya’s pulse begins to race, pondering what has happened that has her best friend so distraught.

But Arya obeys, silent for a breath, listening. 

All she can hear is the crackle of the fire in the hearth and Cat’s little breaths as she whimpers so she closes her eyes, waiting. 

Then it comes, another sound, one she’s never heard before, cracking on the wind like— 

“A dragon,” Sansa says, rising on unsteady feet with Cat, her feet wobbling and Arya reaches to take her from her sister as Sansa grips the round table to keep her balance. 

“Sansa?” Arya says, concerned.

“I’m fine,” she says, but the words are uncertain. “I didn’t break my fast yet today.” 

“Meera, go fetch her food from the kitchens,” Arya says as Sansa looks up. 

Sansa opens her mouth to speak, but a hoarse cough comes out instead and with it blood, splattering across Arya’s and Cat’s faces, as her sister stares at her with wide eyes. 

Meera doesn’t even look at Arya as she lunges out the door. 

Sansa wipes away some of the blood on her lips with shaky fingers, pulling them back to look at them, rubbing the pads together, staring at the blood there confused, as if she’s unsure whose it is or where it’s come from. 

When she realizes it’s hers, she looks at Arya with terror in her eyes. 

A choking sound comes out of her throat then as she coughs thick blood into her hands that pools in her palms and dribbles down her chin. 

Sansa lurches forward as Arya rushes to put Cat somewhere safely on the floor, grasping her sister by the waist, all the while watching helplessly as Sansa gags and a thin lonely ribbon of blood drools out of her mouth into her waiting palms. 

It’s hot when it leaks through Sansa’s fingers and onto Arya’s hands before it seeps into the bearskin rug that lies on the floor.

Her sister looks at her then, pale as Ghost. “Arya . . .” she says in a confused whisper, as her head lulls and her eyes roll back in her head and Cat screams on the floor.

As her knees hit the floor under the weight of Sansa’s body and she watches her sister choke on her own blood all Arya can think is, _don’t, Sansa, please don’t. You’re ruining your pretty grey dress._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, rapid fire chapters because I had this one ready to go. Apologies for typos. 
> 
> Thank you again, lovely readers. Your comments fuel me! I also have a question for you: what would you make Gendry a Lord of, if anything? I'm curious. Post your thoughts in the comments!


	5. Chapter 5

***

Sansa’s in her arms, unconscious, breathing raspy breaths, Cat wailing on her back on the floor next to them, when Arya leans her face close to her sister’s mouth, searching with her nose for scents of poison.

The scent of copper hits her first, then something earthy, like wine, followed by iron, but she smells nothing else laced beneath as the scent stirs a memory of Gendry, of how he use to smell . . . and she desperately wants him to be here with her then. 

But it’s Aegon Targaryen who arrives in the doorway instead, a layer of snow covering his pitch colored cloak, clearly bewildered by the sight that greets him and Arya would be shocked if she weren’t so worried for her sister. 

They don’t share any words as Meera arrives with stained cheeks and he takes one look at Arya’s blood splattered face before all but rushing to scoop Sansa from her arms, Meera shouting directions at him. 

Arya’s rising to reach for Cat and tucking her into her furs as Aegon’s kicking the oak door full open with his heel, hurrying down the hall to the steps, Arya quick on his heels, all the while cooing to Cat reassuring words, telling her that her mother is fine, all the while knowing that she’s not. 

Sam meets them halfway down the stairs, breathless, Gilly beside him, snow in her hair, saying, “Take her to the turret,” as Aegon follows a running Gilly and Sam lumbers behind them both. Within moments Arya loses sight of all of them in the snow. 

“You knew,” she shouts to Meera over the wind once they’re outside. It isn’t a question or an accusation. It just is. 

The snows are falling heavier now, the flurries whipping about them in large, fat flakes and she can hardly see Meera’s face or hear her voice well on the wind, but she hears regret in her words as she shouts in a choked rasp, “I would have stopped it if I could have. Bran tried, Arya. He tried.” 

Arya understands then.

Bran had told her at Long Lake. 

 _We have a chance, Arya, if I can change the outcomes of certain events, we have a **chance** at surviving the wars to come_.

He had paused then, reaching for her hand, his eyes still and focused on hers, but his mouth sad _. But there are also_ _some events I cannot change . . .terrible ones. If I alter them, we lose. If I change them, the Others win. Do you understand?_

She had nodded, knowing he meant terrible for _them_. For Starks.

 _How terrible?_ She had asked then, but Bran had refused to tell her. 

He’d explained some other things though. 

_We lose if you never meet Jaqen. Then you never go to the House and learn about dragon’s ichor. We lose if Jon never becomes Lord Commander. Then wildlings join the army of the dead. We lose if father or Robb or mother or Rickon survive. Then Jon never becomes King and Daenerys attacks the North. We lose if I don’t lose my legs. Then I never go North We lose if Daenerys doesn’t join us. We lose if Cersei doesn’t sit the Iron Throne for a time. We lose if the glass candles are lit too soon. We lose if Jon never rides his dragon to the Wall. We lose if . . ._

_We lose if . . . We lose if . . ._

The list had gone on and on, making her head swim. Most were events that had already happened, but there were four that hadn’t, involving her, which Bran had made her commit to memory.

None of the four, however, had been _we lose if Sansa survives_. 

As she stares at Meera now she knows she thinks her sister will die, but all Arya can think is that she’s seen others sicker than Sansa recover from the fever. Sansa could be one. 

Arya would _make_ her be one.

 _Not today. Not yet. There’s still time. Not today._  

“Take her to the nursery,” she shouts, handing her Cat. “And find Clegane,” she tells her and then she’s running through the snow, outpacing Sam at the entrance to the turret’s tower, bounding up the tower steps. 

She enters one room and then another on the floor that shares Sam’s chambers until she finally finds Sansa in a third and also Aegon, hesitating, unsure what to do, staring at Sansa on the bed. 

She pushes him out of the way, irritated and begins helping Gilly undress her sister as she points to two large steel tubs in the corner, barking orders at him to fetch snow.

_If we can stop the fever Sansa has a chance._

As she’s undoing the laces of her sister’s overdress she tells her, “Not today, Sansa. _Not_. _Today_. You will _not_ die today.” 

Sansa’s skin is burning beneath her fingers as she begins to bunch the hem of her sister’s shift in her hands and when she pulls it over her sister’s head she starts to come around, moaning, sounding like she’s in a fever dream, murmuring the name _Alayne_. 

Then she sees it, raised and angry, red and leaking pus, as large as a silver coin, on her sister’s right breast. 

Sam arrives, sending Gilly out to get more supplies as Arya takes an abrupt step back and watches him move through the room, opening drawers and unstopping bottles, with a velocity she’s never seen him have before.

When he spots the wound on her sister’s breast he halts, snapping his eyes to hers.

_It’s the fever. It’s the fever. It’s the fever._

Sam peels his eyes from hers, reaching for thick gloves and a mask as Gilly returns, Aegon rushing into the room behind her, breathless, heaving tubs of snow in gloved hands.

“It’s the _fever_ , Sam,” she tells him, trying to sound confident, as if she’s the maester and not him, but instead her voice is pleading. 

Then Sam reaches for a knife.

It’s thin, thinner than her index finger, and shorter than the length of her own forearm, forged to be small so that it can be precise and she thinks, as her stomach twists, _that is a knife for removing faces._

Aegon wastes no time on introductions or explanations as he spots the knife in Sam’s hand and asks, alarmed, “What’s that for?” He swallows, glancing at Arya, who shakes her head, and then at Sam, who ignores him as Sansa begins to vomit, still dazed, eyes rolling in her sockets, naked save for her small clothes. 

Sam’s face grows troubled as Gilly moves to help her sit up and then he shouts for her to not take one more step.

“Move away from the bed, Gilly,” he tells her slowly and the alarm in his voice has gooseflesh rising on Arya’s limbs as Sam pulls down his mask and moves to do what Gilly meant to do. 

Sansa heaves again, only this time her vomit is flecked with black as it spills onto the bed, dripping to the floor, onto Sam’s boots, and all of them know then that this isn’t winter fever. 

This is something worse. 

Sam halts, looking at Arya and then Aegon, speaking words harshly and leaving no room for argument. “Neither of you will leave this tower until I know what this is.” Sam glances around the room. “Where is the babe?” 

“I—” Arya is staring at him wide-eyed still processing what he has said. “I gave her to Meera.” 

Sam turns to Gilly. “Go to the turret entrance and send a guard to find them. Quick. Have Meera bring anyone else who has come in contact with Sansa’s blood.” 

Aegon snaps his eyes to Arya then, troubled and she doesn’t understand why until she remembers she has Sansa’s blood on her face. 

Her fingers reach up, brushing her cheeks. When she pulls them back the tips of six are bloodied. She looks at the blood on Aegon’s jerkin then and he follows her gaze, gulping. 

She takes a step toward Sam, her fear for her sister plain on her face as she glances at her, writhing on the bed, half-lucid. “What is wrong with her, Sam? Is she—” 

“Out Arya! Now! Both of you!” Sam growls as his arm shoots out from his body, waving violently at the door. 

Even Aegon flinches back from his tone and then he’s dragging her from the room by the elbow, shutting the door, pulling her down the hall a few feet, saying words for her, about how her sister will recover, but they only make her angry because they are coming from Aegon Targaryen’s mouth instead of Jon Snow’s. 

She glares at him then as she rips her arm out of his grasp, shoving him off her with her elbow and he stumbles back against the dark walls of the turret tower, staring at her, bewildered, brows furrowed and mouth open, caught off his guard. 

Her brows slam, glaring at him. “Why are you here? Where is my _brother_?”

He snorts, clearly irritated and she could smack him just for that. “Don’t you mean _my_ brother now?” His eyes narrow. “You never told me you were hiding a Targaryen heir in this frozen wasteland you call home,” he hisses. 

“I didn’t know he was one then,” she hisses back, defensively. 

He glowers at her as he leans a shoulder against the wall, glancing at the door to Sansa’s room, silent for a breath before he exhales loudly. “He’s headed for the Wall,” he finally tells her. 

That gives her a start. “What? What’s happened at the Wall?” 

He looks at her like she should already know. “Your _raven’s_ what’s happened,” he smirks then, leaning in. “You know the one. Where you asked about his mistress? I must say Stark, even I didn’t think _you_ could be _that_ bold.”

She could punch him with his ridiculous silver hair and purple eyes. 

“Where is he?” She hisses again, instead. 

“He’s already on his way to the Wall. He left me here.” 

She fists her hands, furious at Jon for not even bothering to stay long enough to speak with her. 

Her eyes narrow. “Then why are _you_ here?” 

“For the Council,” he says, sounding displeased, “in Jon’s place.”

“His _place_?” She says angrily, as if Jon Snow even has a place in the North now. She gets in Aegon’s face then, wishing it were Jon Snow’s instead and says quiet, harsh words. “He _needs_ to get his shit together.” 

Aegon snorts, crossing his arms. “Agreed. All of it.” He seems just as irritated as her and he must register her surprise as next he says, “Didn’t he tell you? He spoke with your brother. The strange one.” He swallows, clearly uncomfortable and she knows he can only mean Bran. “He’s the reason Jon rides for the Wall. He’s the reason he’s remained in the Riverlands so long.” His face turns serious then as he meets her eyes. “I’ve brought the Golden Company here.” 

She doesn’t need to ask why. It’s plain on his face Bran advised this too and it can only mean the Others will take the Wall. 

Aegon looks entirely miserable about it and so is she, but not because of the enemy, because Jon Snow somehow found time for Bran and not her.

Her temper flares, but her words are low and cutting. “Has he forgotten he’s King in the North?”

He steps closer then, his eyes narrowing to slits. “It _sounds_ like you _want_ him to be.” He points an accusing finger at her chest. “We had an agreement Stark, and that was never part of it. _You_ were supposed to rally the North to my cause.”

But she doesn’t hear a question or an answer, so she waits as her grey eyes meet his violet ones. 

He exhales forcefully, shaking his head as he licks his lips, glancing away. “He does and he is. For now.” He shifts his eyes back to hers meaningfully. “But you and I both know the North will never let a Targaryen lead them.”

She snorts dryly, crossing her arms. “They won’t have a choice if she shows up with her fucking dragons.” 

“ _Dragon_ ,” Aegon corrects, with a smirk. 

“One. Three. A dragon is a dragon.” She leans her shoulder against the wall next to him. “Where does Jon stand?” 

“He wants no part of the throne and told us as much.” He grunts, clearly frustrated. “But right now . . . he’s firmly in her camp.” 

She shakes her head, disappointed. “I thought when I encouraged him to go to Dragonstone that he’d become your ally. I didn’t anticipate her coming here.” 

Gilly comes rushing back up the stairs then, ignoring them as she opens the door to the room where Sansa is and Arya tries to peer inside as Gilly quickly shuts it. 

“Gendry says Jon’s in love with her,” she tells him then. “Is that true?” 

He glances at her, suspicious. “How do you know any of that?”

She tells him what Edd’s letters said. “How did that happen?” She asks, not bothering to hide the accusation from her voice or her face. 

Aegon presses his mouth into a line, displeased. “How do you think?” 

She exhales, turning to lean her back flat against the wall, glowering. “She’s beautiful. He fell for her.”

He snorts bitterly. “No. My brother is tall, dark and handsome . . . and that face he makes when he broods . . .” He shakes his head. “It didn’t help my cause, and he broods _all the time_.” He glances at her, annoyed. “Was he always like that?”

She presses her lips together, shrugging in answer. 

He leans his back against the wall beside her, throwing up his hands. “By the time they arrived in the Stormlands she was already in love with him. I had to adapt the plan.” He glances at her sideways, raking her with an accusing look. “A little warning from _you_ might have helped matters.”

“I couldn’t get word to you,” she hisses, glaring at him. “I didn’t even know they had _met_ until I got back.”

He snorts angrily. “I gathered that when I saw an army of Dothraki and northmen at my _gates!_ ” He hisses back, his hands gesturing wildly at his stupid imaginary gates. 

All of this was making her head hurt. _He_ was making her head hurt with his stupid silver hair. 

She exhales loudly as she looks away, quiet for a breath before she finally says, “Your decision to align with them rather than draw out the war was a good one.” 

“What was that?” He asks, leaning closer. “That last part. About my decision-making?” 

She exhales forcefully. “I said it was _good_ ,” she tells him begrudgingly as she glances back at him wanting to smack the smug grin off his face. 

Instead she slides down against the wall to the floor, drawing her knees to her chest. 

“Well this is a mess,” she says after a moment. 

He grunts. “Agreed.” 

She’s quiet as she looks up at him, studying his face. He was a strange man, with his wispy long silver hair and his indigo eyes that seemed almost blue. He was tall too, taller than she remembered him being three years ago, tall as Gendry, but where Gendry was black-bearded and broad-chested, Aegon was clean-shaven, lithe and long-limbed. 

“You’re taller,” she tells him. 

He smirks, looking down at her. “You’re not.” He slides down the wall to sit beside her, a knee drawn to his chest, his arms crossed. 

She hates herself for even asking what she does next, but she must. “Is she kind to him, at least?”

He looks at her pitifully then. “Honestly, Arya, what do you see in him? He’s a sour sort.” She could kick him and he must see because he exhales, rolling his eyes and shrugs, saying, “Nice enough. She gave him a title.” He snorts, clearly unimpressed. “Lord of the Royal Armory.” 

She smiles sadly, stretching her legs out in front of her. “That fits him.” 

He gives her a strange look. “All it did was give her an excuse to send him away to the Wall. She could have given him a lordship and a holdfast. He certainly earned both in the Riverlands.” 

Her eyes narrow. “Jon told me _he_ sent him to the Wall.” 

Aegon shakes his head. “Dany wanted him gone so she could carry on an affair with Jon.” He frowns. “It was a stupid decision. He’s meant to be on the field, not up there where he’s no use to anyone. He’s the one who was helping us make progress in the Riverlands. Then she sent him away and it started falling apart. Now the Lannisters are between us and the Neck, the Others at the Wall and, Arya,” he pauses to look at her, “we’ve had disturbing reports out of Meereen about Asshai and the trade towns along the Sothoryos coast.” 

This is the most information she’s received in nearly twenty moons, none of it good, and all of it unsettling. Whatever is in these reports alarms him and her stomach twists as she pulls her knees back, close to her chest, afraid to hear the answer to what she asks next. 

“What sorts of reports?”

“The kind we’re used to getting from the Wall. Arya, I don’t even know if I believe them, but . . . there’s no Wall in Asshai.” 

They both sit quietly with that for several moments as she shifts her gaze to the window, the glass rattling against the winds of the storm, her mind wondering how Jon is going to make it to the Wall in this weather.

 _How do you fight them north of the Wall? We didn’t. We ran._  

Aegon follows her gaze, frowning. “I told him to wait out the storm. He would hear none of it.” He sighs so irritatingly that she jerks back to stare at him and he’s shaking his head now, angry. “I’m tired of trying to convince him to stop taking unnecessary risks.” 

She scowls nodding. “I’m tired of playing his lady wife.” 

He snorts, tightening the cross of his arms. “A waste of your true talents, I told him.” 

She looks at him suspicious then. “ _What_ did you tell him about our arrangement?” 

He gives her a withering look. “I’m not playing the lying game with you.” His face is critical. “I know, Arya. You told him everything about our arrangement during some peculiar confessional the two of you shared before your creepy trees,” he hisses as his hands motion to the godswood. 

“They’re not creepy!” She says, defensively. “And so what if I told him? He’s my _brother_.” 

“ _No_ , he’s _my_ brother,” he says, irritated. “He’s _your_ cousin. The two of you . . .” He motions with hands to the air beside her as if Jon were standing right there, “with your grim faces and sinister trees, all those _secrets_ you share . . . so oddly _close_.”

“I had a secret with _you!_ ” She snaps.

“That you told to _him!_ ” He snaps back, sounding jealous and she knows he is, as jealous of her as she is of him and the sibling bond he now has with Jon.

She glances away, huffing, quiet for a moment, stewing, rubbing her temples, knowing, begrudgingly, that Aegon’s right, that she betrayed his trust to Jon. 

“I’m sorry,” she finally says quietly. “For telling Jon.” 

He lifts his hand then, placing the back of it to her forehead. “Are you feeling well, Stark?” 

She slaps it away, knowing she’s being mocked. “I feel _fine_ , Aegon.” 

He smirks arrogantly. “Had to be sure,” he tells her, “No one will believe me when I tell them I’ve heard a _Stark_ apologize.”

She could kick him, but she owes him an explanation so instead she reluctantly says, “I told him because I wanted him to know he has a brother and what kind of person that brother is.” 

He glances at her sideways then. “And what kind of person am I?” 

“Right now? The infuriating kind,” she snaps. 

The contract for Aegon had brought her to Westeros where she’d spent three moons on Dragonstone before being assigned maidservant to him, all while wearing the face of a young woman who had been anything but. The woman had been a Lady, pampered and cared for by a wealthy family all her life, but her father had defiled her from the time she was small and when he finally left a babe in her belly, she’d come to the Faceless seeking the Gift, unable to stand her own skin or the thing he’d left inside her. 

Aegon had been none the wiser, though and as she poured his wine and drew his baths, she listened to his conversations with Haldon, Connington and Lemore. He was learned, she’d realized at once, and more educated than most of the lords and ladies in Westeros, but more than that, he was also kind. He cared about the smallfolk and what the wars had put them through because, she’d later come to learn, he had lived among them for a time, just like her. 

Aegon had been attracted to the face she wore, she knew, and she’d used it to her advantage, remaining behind one evening when he’d asked her to share wine with him, intending to kill him that night while he made some advance on her, but . . . 

He never _did_ and instead he’d told her about the Lannisters, bemoaning what they had done to his family, to his mother, to his sister.

She had known all of that of course, the awful things the Mountain had done, but to hear him tell it, to hear it described by a _Targaryen_ , in anguish, wishing to avenge his dead, reminded her of her own. It reminded her of her list and of all the awful things the Mountain and Cersei had done to her and her family.

What was she doing, being Faceless, while that woman still lived?

And when he’d told her with burning rage about how much he craved for Cersei to die, how much he lusted for it to be a slow, painful death, she’d realized Aegon Targaryen would need to survive because she craved the exact same thing.

She’d removed her mask then. 

He hadn’t even been surprised. 

 _Lemore is one too,_ he’d said with indifference, looking at her new face, her real one, asking, _who are you?_  

She’d hesitated, almost supplying the answer she’d given to that question for more years than she knew.

Instead, without saying her name, she’d told him all the vile things the Lannisters had done to her family since Robert Barratheon had come to Winterfell.

 _You’re a Stark,_ he’d said, bewildered, puzzling it out, as his eyes narrowed to slits and he rose abruptly, stepping back from her.

 _Arya,_ she’d said, her voice raspy, her own name strange on her tongue, _Arya Stark. I’m **Lady** Arya Stark. _

_Of course they sent a Stark to kill a Targaryen!_ He’d hissed at her then, but she’d been quick, and smarter, walking him back into a corner as they’d talked and as he’d tried to call his guards, like she’d known he would, she’d clamped her hand over his mouth. 

 _That would be unwise, your grace,_ she’d murmured as she pressed a blade to his groin and removed her hand from his mouth. _You’re going to help me._

 _And why would I do that?_ He’d spat in her face. _The Starks helped end my family._

She’d pressed the blade harder against his groin. _Because we want the same thing now. The Lannisters dead._

He’d scoffed. _I don’t need your help to do that._

She’d smiled wickedly then. _Yes you do. The rest of the Starks are gone. Who else is going to help rally the North to your cause?_

That had got him listening as she lowered the blade and they agreed on a plan that would sit him on the throne and end Cersei’s life. 

Only then she’d learned that the Starks _weren’t_ gone. She’d met Howland and he’d told her of the Others, that they were coming, and of Jon, that he was _King_ in the north, and a Targaryen. Suddenly, Cersei mattered less. 

Meanwhile, her loyalties shifted to Jon then, until he told her that night before the weirwood that he didn’t want the Iron Throne, which was when she told him about Aegon. 

 _He’s the king Westeros needs, Jon. Meet with him on Dragonstone and see for yourself,_ she’d told him. 

But in the intervening two years somehow Jon had decided Daenerys was the Queen Westeros needed and now, it seemed, they were on opposite sides of the Targaryen claimants to the throne. 

She glances at Aegon now and asks him why Jon has chosen Daenerys and not him. 

“ _Because_ , Arya,” he drawls, “I’m not like the two of them. I’m not a dragon rider and . . .” He glances at her, his mouth sour, his next words mocking. “I haven’t been _resurrected_.” 

She grimaces as she glances away. “It isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” She turns back to look at him. “Tell me what he sees in her.”

He glowers. “You mean besides being brought back from the dead?” He lifts a hand to count off the reasons with his fingers. “Her three armies. Her dragons. She’s a conqueror. The people – at least the ones she doesn’t burn – love her. Who better to battle the Others?” 

“The Others, maybe, but to rule Westeros after?” She shakes her head, disbelieving now. “No. How can he support her? You don’t burn the harvests. You don’t threaten to burn people alive.” 

He stares blankly at the wall. “I’m going to start tomorrow,” he tells her dryly. “Right after I come back from the dead from—” He motions to his bloody jerkin. “Whatever this is.” 

Her face grows stern. “We’ve heard stories about what her dragon did in the Reach. Did she really burn the grain wagons? She’s becoming her father. She threatened to burn me. To burn Gen—” 

“ _Careful_ , Stark,” he says, trainig his eyes on hers, a finger pointed to her chest. “She’s still my family and she would make for a capable ruler if she weren’t going mad. She’s intelligent, formidable, and _kind_. What is happening to her is not her fault.” 

Arya gapes at him accusingly. “You’re scheming to take her throne!” She hisses. 

He’s more irritated than moved by her anger though. “It’s not _her_ throne and you’re helping me, which should be vengeance enough. You will not take her life. _Swear it_.”

She snorts. “If that’s a jest, it’s not a funny one.” 

“Arya—” 

“I will not! That woman hurt me in ways you will never know, Egg. If she endangers Jon or Gendry I _will_ kill her. I won’t give you their lives too. I’m already putting my own on the line,” she pauses, exhaling forcefully, as she rubs her temples again. He was making her headache grow by the second. “They’ve sent assassins for me.” 

His face is dark then and trained on the wall. “Well we knew they would.” He shifts his eyes to hers, his mouth a smirk. “Clearly they didn’t succeed.” 

 _No,_ she thinks, grimacing as her stomach twists into knots, _but because of Jaqen’s vigilance, not mine._  

His mouth twists then as he licks his lips, eyeing her worriedly, hesitating, and the concern she sees in his eyes unsettles her.

“Arya . . .while we were in the Stormlands, they sent someone for Gendry.” 

She bristles. “What?” She asks abruptly, rising, pacing, her heart beginning to hammer inside her chest.

He rises, gripping her shoulders to cease her pacing as his face grows an emotion she’s never seen on it before. _Regret_. “Lemore stopped them before too much damage was done.” 

 _Too much damage?_ A cold sweat begins to break out on her skin.

“Did they injure him? Did they poison him?” Her words are urgent, but her voice is small. This happened to him because of _her_.

He nods, his mouth sour. 

“Tell me.” 

“Arya . . . are you sure you want to—” 

She cuts him off. “I need to hear it.” 

He exhales forcefully, but nods. “He took a knife to his shoulder. Another to his ribs, but it was shallow. One to the thigh. The one he took to the shoulder though . . . it was tipped in a poison that neither Lemore or Haldon knew. His arm is . . .” 

He’s saying something else then, but she can hardly hear him, as her head swims. Gendry had been attacked because of her. 

She’s never felt so awful in her life. 

Her skin feels hot, clammy. 

“Arya?” she can hear him saying, but his voice sounds far way. “Arya . . .” 

As she lurches forward, her eyelids heavy, it’s pale spiders she thinks of, crawling in the hair of a black-bearded man lying next to her in the Neck. 

***

“You look terrible, your grace,” Edd says slowly, before turning to Pyp. “Does his grace look terrible, Pyp?”

Pyp appraises Jon’s face, nodding. “ _His grace_ does. Would you like some more ale, _your grace_?” Pyp says before inclining his head to Edd. “What do you think, Edd, about _his grace_? I think _his grace_ could use more ale.” 

Edd leans back, crossing his arms, motioning with his hands to Jon. “Look at _his grace’s_ face. _His grace_ needs something stronger. Ale won’t do for _his grace_.”

Pyp stares at Jon for a moment, then shakes his head, decided. “No. _His grace_ needs a song about other _your graces_.” He turns to Edd. “What _your graces_ songs do you know? We should sing _his grace_ one.” 

Jon glowers, cupping his ale between his hands, rolling his eyes as he exchanges a glance with Gendry, who’s biting back a grin and shrugging as if to say, _don’t look at me_. 

This has been going on all night. 

He had arrived on the Green in the hours shortly before the hour of the wolf, a day past, leaving Daenerys behind in the Riverlands, but now he wonders if he should of sent her with Drogon instead given he was larger. 

He shouldn’t have flown the Green as hard as he had, not in these temperatures and not at night, but the Wall sounded on the verge of collapse in Arya’s raven and then Edd had sent him one directly as well, and in his concern he had pushed the Green harder than he ever had before. 

The jade beast had been haunting his sleep and tugging at the edges of his mind from the moment the Red Woman brought him back.

When the dragon dreams took him, and the Green first intruded into his mind, it had felt different from Ghost – more cunning, _solitary_ , inquisitive, whimsical even – arriving as a pucker between his brows that had felt almost like a kiss.

It had reminded him of Arya and that day he had given her a sword. 

He learned the Green had left its mother, angry and resentful at her for being imprisoned, and had been lurking with another in a cavern on what he would later come to discover was Dragonmont on Dragonstone. 

The first time Jon had felt the beast’s anger it had jolted him awake, coursing through him like white-hot flame, its power breathtaking and lingering long after the beast had left his mind, unnerving Jon. 

He knew then that he wasn’t skin-changing into the dragon. 

The dragon was skin-changing into _him_. 

The discovery had been both terrifying and intriguing. 

He had called the Green to him then, stirred by a wild curiosity that he could not release. 

As he’d ridden the beast over the Wolfswood outside Winterfell, its power surging through his veins, it had almost overwhelmed him, but he had since come to learn that _that_ had only been a taste of the Green’s full strength. 

The more the north grew behind him as he traveled south alongside Daenerys, the more the Green’s strength and power seemed to climb, its intensity rising with each flap of it’s golden flecked jade wings. 

Dragons were vulnerable, weakened considerably, Jon Snow realized then, by the cold frozen climate of the North. 

That first night they’d made camp in the Neck he’d studied Daenerys, catching the troubled look on her face whenever she stared at Drogon, knowing she had noticed that vulnerability too. 

Remembering that power in the south now, he’s asking himself if it was wise to bring the Green with him to the Wall while the other two remained south. He’d pushed the dragon hard again tonight as he’d flown reconnaissance along the Wall. 

That high, the Wall had seemed thin, like a rope that he could reach down and grab with his hands, each castle along it’s length a knot. He’d traveled the full length of it down and back twice, searching for patterns, for weaknesses, for the Others. 

He hadn’t found the latter, but he’d found plenty of the former. The forest had grown too close at ten of the castles and at Deep Lake the water was frozen. Wights were massed in force at nine of them, at least five hundred at each. 

They needed more men. Edd was right. They needed women too. He’d sent ravens to every keep and holdfast asking for both. He’d even sent ravens to Essos.

The dragon hadn’t been happy about their night ride either. It was agitated, wanting to be anywhere else but the desolate frigid landscape of the Wall, yet it wasn’t the dragon’s aversion to cold that unsettled Jon the most.

He had felt something coursing through him that he had thought at first was hatred, hatred for the cold maybe, but as he flew high over the Nightfort and Deep Lake, trying to spot the Others, he realized what he felt was something else. 

Whatever the Others were, the Green not only loathed them, it was terrified of them. 

They had lingered over the Nightfort and not at Jon’s behest. There was something there that the Green wanted him to see, to find, but Jon couldn’t read the beast’s mind anymore than the beast could read his. 

 _You know nothing, Jon Snow._  

He has to go there, he knows, but the idea of doing so makes his skin crawl because the Green’s mood toward the Nightfort is the same it has for the Others – revulsion. 

“Or a woman . . .” He hears Pyp’s voice say, pulling him out of his troubled thoughts and back to Edd’s chambers.

“Aye, a _woman_. We should find _his grace_ one. M’lord Gendry too,” Edd replies. “ _His grace_ and _m’lord_ look like they could use some." 

“ _Your grace, m’lord,_ when was the last time either of you had a woman?” Pyp asks, not waiting for answer. “The Night’s Watch holds its hospitality in high regard, _your grace, m’lord_. And _his grace_ and _m’lord_ are our honored guests. If _his grace_ and _m’lo_ —”

Gendry’s grin is part scowl now. “I have a lady _wife_ ,” he reminds them and Jon bristles at the bitterness in the words, his eyes still, as Gendry turns to look at him, his face asking a question and Jon’s refusing to answer it. 

He thinks he’s bedding Dany, Jon knows, but if he minds, he doesn’t show it to Jon and Jon doubts that the man does. Gendry had a strange relationship with his wife, at times strained, brought on by her threats to Arya’s life, and at other times respectful, brought about by Dany and he both being orphans that desired to leave the world better than they found it. 

Jon’s relationship with Dany was odd too, at times loving and other times hateful. She was like him – someone who had seen the other side, who had felt the despair of knowing that nothingness, who had returned without any explanation or path or direction. 

He’d be lying if he said that that didn’t make him love her, that that didn’t make him feel less alone. 

He’d also be lying if he said she wasn’t comely. 

She’s in love with him, he knows, but he won’t bed her. She had made an oath to the old gods, with Gendry, before the heart tree. 

He hates her for doing it, for where it now has left them, _all_ of them. He hadn’t known then, _none_ of them had, that the three heads of the dragon would actually grow fond of each other.

 _Put aside Gendry and wed me,_ he’d murmured to Dany countless times since. _Let us be content._

 _I can’t Jon. I was wrong, but I can’t. I’ve poisoned them both against me._ Her voice had been anguished and laced with regret. _If I put him aside now they’ll wed and rebel._  

He had tried to reason with her, but she would hear none of it, believing she’d lost all chance at gaining them for allies, gaining their _trust_ because she’d threatened to burn them. 

Jon can’t say she isn’t wrong for thinking it. 

 _I would bring fire and blood to anyone who threatened to harm Aegon or you,_ she had told him, _you think they won’t do the same for each other?_  

This was his fault.

He had taken her dragon.

If he had thought through the consequences of that action Daenerys Targaryen would have never come to Winterfell and Gendry would be wed to a woman he loves rather than a woman he doesn’t understand.

He should have done as Arya suggested and left for Dragonstone at once to meet Aegon, but the lure of the dragon, his curiosity, it had all muddled his mind.

Gendry seemed to have forgiven Dany for threatening _him_ , but he had never forgiven her for threatening Arya. _She has no claim to the throne,_ Gendry had bellowed angrily at the two of them one evening, _She’s innocent,_ _yet you threatened her life all the same. Is that the kind of Queen you plan to be?_

But Jon knew, and Aegon too, that Arya was far from innocent. She was, in some ways, playing the game far more stealthily than any of the rest of them and Jon Snow didn’t like to wonder what might happen if Dany ever found out the truth about her arrangement with Aegon . . .

Gendry and Dany had reached some mutual understanding after that. He’d told her he would always be in love Arya and she told him she didn’t begrudge him for it, but that he would not make a fool of her by having an affair. 

Shortly after that he’d left for the Wall to oversee the dragonglass.

But Jon knew what the man was really doing. He was biding his time until the day Arya came for him to go to Qohor. 

 _Soon._  

He had no illusions about what Gendry wished to do with Arya while there, a continent away, with no guards to watch them. 

He frowns. _But there will be spies to catch them._  

“We hear you were given a Targaryen name,” Pyp says then, but his mocking tone is gone now, replaced with genuine interest. 

Jon’s eyes are still. “Who told you that?” 

Edd’s the one that answers. “Your sister, but Arya refuses to share what it is.” 

Jon’s looking at Edd wondering just how well he knows his cousin if they’re past titles and signatories and he would grin at the mention of her name, but this woman who was once his little sister makes his mouth frown instead because, he knows, she’s angry with him for spending so much time away from Winterfell. 

Yet Bran had been clear a year ago at God’s Eye. 

 _You cannot return north until the Neck is secure,_ he had said flatly and Jon had struggled to look at him because he looked so much like Robb. _We need the Lannister forces to win against the enemy._  

He takes a deep pull from his ale, feeling guilt in his chest, knowing it’s for Arya and how she’ll react when he tells her that. He’d rather battle an ice dragon than have that conversation, watching her eyes fill with disappointment, disappointment in _him_. 

“Tell us,” Edd goads. 

“Arya told Edd it’s _‘too Targaryen’,”_ Pyp says as he adopts a shrill feminine voice that has Edd and Jon grinning, “ _and_ _not Stark enough.”_

Pyp’s deep in his cups tonight. “ _Lady_ Arya, Pyp,” Jon reminds him with a warning look and he doesn’t miss how Gendry bristles as he takes a gulp from his ale. 

Edd smiles, nodding to Gendry. “He says call her that and you’re like to never walk again.” 

Jon grins a little, knowing the words are true as he stretches and fists his sword hand, stiff from the hours he spent on the Green. The beast kept every part of him warm, but even its fire couldn’t reach the fingers of his sword hand or keep his face from growing numb in these temperatures. 

Gendry leans back in his chair as he crosses his arms. “That or worse,” he tells them.

Gendry turns to Jon and inclines his head. “Do you think she sounds shrill?”

Arya was anything but.

“No,” Jon laughs softly, shaking his head. “I don’t think she even flusters.” 

“No,” Gendry says quietly, more to himself than to the table, “she can fluster.” 

Jon takes a swig from his ale, stretching his sword hand again as he watches the shy grin on Gendry’s mouth chase the flush climbing up his face. 

Edd snorts. “Can’t imagine what does. Half the time her ravens threaten to kill Jon and he’s a bloody king.” Edd turns to him, dour. “My luck she _will_ kill you and then I’ll be dealing with the Others myself when they come.” 

Jon frowns. He hadn’t know she’d made her anger that plain to Edd too. 

‘So come on, let’s hear it,” Pyp says, “Your true name.”

Jon swallows, glancing at Gendry who shrugs, frowning as if to say, _may as well just get it over with._ His friend knew the problems that came with too many names just like Jon did. Gendry still felt uncomfortable introducing himself as a Lord and a Barratheon even though he’d held the title and the name for nearly two years now. 

“Aemon,” he finally tells them quietly.

The room is quiet for a minute and Jon Snow grows uncomfortable, thinking how much he’d like to have just one name instead of two, when Pyp breaks the silence. 

“So. . .” he says, slowly, “you’re named after a blind man?” He bursts out in laughter. 

Jon chuckles. “Aye.” 

As the laughter dies, Edd grows a sad smile. “Maester Aemon would have liked to have shared his name with you, Jon,” he tells him, before turning to Gendry to explain who the man was to all of them.

Jon had thought about the maester often since that conversation in the crypts with Arya. He missed him and his council, but it saddened him even more to learn the man had been his family without either of them ever knowing it.

The Targaryens that remained now were all strangers, strangers to each other and to themselves and their House, with no lore or history or elders to guide them. It gave Jon solace though, to know he wasn’t alone, fumbling blindly in the dark, trying to figure out what it meant to be a Targaryen. 

He was still trying to figure out what it meant to be a Stark.

He supposed he’d be doing both for the rest of his life.

 _Am I Stark? A Targaryen? A Snow? A bastard? An heir? A King? An abomination?_  

When he was with his aunt and brother he didn’t feel like a Stark and they didn’t treat him like a Snow. He felt like someone else, someone deserving, someone . . . who _belonged_ , who wasn’t a bastard, but instead an equal.

He had grown to love Dany and Aegon deeply for it and he felt _home_ when he was with them.

Yet he felt home in the North too, with Arya, with the cold burrowing into his bones and the winds rattling inside his chest. 

He frowns now, unsure of where he belongs or of what or who he is. 

Pyp raises his ale to the table. “To Maester Aemon and Lady Arya, His grace’s sister,” he says.

“Cousin,” Edd corrects before taking a pull from his tankard. 

Jon Snow’s frown deepens at the reminder. Arya is not his little sister, he knows, and, oddly, it had only been through gaining Aegon as a brother that he’d finally come to accept that truth. 

Pyp points with his ale to Gendry. “I think you still love her,” he slurs, and the words are sincere, but Jon Snow tightens his jaw all the same, glaring at Pyp, who’s now too deep in his cups to think it unwise to antagonize a man twice his size.

“No more talk of women. It gives me a headache,” Edd says, frowning, but there’s a nervousness beneath the words as he shifts his eyes to Gendry.

Jon follows his gaze watching as Gendry shifts in his seat, leaning forward on the table, looking at Edd and then Pyp, but not him and Jon knows why. 

Gendry Barratheon blames him for why he and Arya were parted and Jon Snow can’t say he doesn’t deserve it.

“That was a long time ago,” Gendry finally says, the words so hollow all of the men at the table hear the lie. 

A knock at the door has them all turning as Satin walks in and hands Edd a scroll, glancing at Jon, concerned, before taking his leave. 

Jon watches the door groan behind the steward as he hears Edd begin to unravel the scroll. 

“If this is another raven from Sam telling me about some bloody—” Edd cuts himself off abruptly as Jon turns back with furrowed brows and Edd’s grin dies, his face now grave, grave even for Dolorous Edd, as he shifts his eyes to Jon’s, handing him the scroll. 

Jon leans across the table to take it from his hand, finding words scribbled in a script as flamboyant as the man who has written them. 

> _Jon,_
> 
> _Sansa is gravely ill. We can thank our friends in Braavos. Arya is . . . not well. A blizzard lies between us. Come when you can. –Egg_

He glances at Gendry, who’s staring at him, the square of his jaw set and Jon knows he thinks the raven means battle, the Lannisters. He doesn’t want to ponder what the man will do when he learns it’s about Arya instead.

He reads the words again before he rises, walking to the flames of the hearth, considering Aegon’s words.

 _Not well?_ He pinches the space between his brows, worried, concerned. Jon Snows throat is tight, but he pushes it away, burying it, because he has no time for sadness. None of them do. Not now. 

Behind him Jon hears a chair grate across the floor then and half a breath later Gendry is at his side asking, “How bad?” 

He hands out the scroll to him, not taking his eyes off the fire. 

Gendry looks at it, dubious. 

He’s better at his letters than he thinks, and there’s time for a lesson tonight.

Jon waits. “You won’t learn if you don’t read them.”

Gendry presses his mouth into a line, nodding, as he pulls the paper from his fingers.

When he’s done, his expression is as anguished as Jon feels.

Gendry’s brows slam as he hands the scroll back to him, leaning against the hearth, his body tense.

Edd breaks the silence. “What does he mean ‘friends in Braavos’?”

Jon sighs, exchanging a glance with Gendry, both men wondering if Sansa’s been poisoned like Gendry had been.

Arya had told him some of the truth about her time with the faceless men that night in the godswood, so when he found himself in the Stormlands outside Griffin’s Roost, staring at a dead faceless man sent to kill Gendry, he hadn’t been surprised. 

He had expected them to come for Arya’s lover, but he never anticipated they’d come for what remained of her family. 

None of the men speak for several breaths as they listen to the logs on the fire cackle and spit. 

“She should never have gone there,” Gendry whispers, shaking his head. “Jon, if they . . . if she . . .” He starts, but his voice is hoarse and Jon tenses, knowing he will say no more, knowing the man is right and that he thinks it’s his fault she did.

He puts his hand on the man’s shoulder. He was punishing himself for decisions that weren’t even his. Worse _,_ Gendry’d been punished by the faceless for the actions of Arya, a woman that wasn’t even his.

Jon watches Gendry’s absent hand kneading his shoulder, his hammer arm, the injury that has never fully recovered from the assassin’s poison, wondering if his friend is thinking the same thing.

He’d taken the injury in the Stormlands, when they weren’t even at battle anymore, and after Gendry’d proven himself by then to be a capable commander. He’d even come to be an adviser of sorts to Jon and Dany on the Riverlands, but more than that, the man had come to be Jon’s friend. He was a bastard turned King’s son like Jon and he didn’t deserve what his association with Arya – what Arya’s actions – had brought him.

Jon tosses the raven to the flames and reaches for his gloves.

Gendry meets his gaze. “Sansa?” he whispers, shaking his head, “Gods, Jon. She shouldn’t have to suffer for Arya’s choices,” but Jon hears the unspoken, _I shouldn’t have to either_ , at the end of them. “These people are ruthless.” 

“She has to live with the consequences of her actions,” he tells him, grimacing. _Like all of us,_ he thinks, _but Gods help us if Sansa’s death is one of them._  

He can feel all their eyes on him, but he ignores them, thinking of the beast now that he’ll have to coax into flying through the cold dead of night.

Jon moves to the door. 

Gendry’s in his line of sight before he reaches for the knob, a hand on his chest and Jon Snow’s jaw grows tighter as his sword hand fists.

“You’re not going.” He words are firm. “There’s a blizzard between here and Winterfell.”

The man was taller than him by half a foot and broader too, but Jon Snow cared little.

“I am,” he tells him as he flexes and reforms his fist into a sword hand.

 “You’ll die out there, or worse . . .” Gendry says, anger in the words. “Your dragon will. Why risk Rhaegal and all our lives?” 

Gendry always called the dragons by the names Dany had given them and for reasons Jon Snow doesn’t understand he had always hated him for it.

 His temper flares. His words though are quiet. “For _her_.”

Gendry’s head jerks back in surprise and confusion, but once his startle dies his eyes narrow to slits as he strides forward. “For _them_.” He’s in his face now as Jon tightens his jaw. “You think I don’t want to go to? If you want to help them, Jon, then help them _here_.” 

Edd places a hand on his shoulder. “He’s right, Jon,” he says, “What good are you are you going to do pacing in Winterfell or dead in a blizzard?”

Jon ignores them both, Gendry bristling, as he shoves the man aside, throwing open the door, Edd on his heels, as he begins rushing down a set of wooden stairs. 

“You shouldn’t be leaving,” Edd says in haste as they round a corner and he’s not talking to _your grace_ now, but pleading with his friend. “Don’t be a fool, Jon. We need to address the situation _here_.”

They did need to. He knew. The things Edd and Arya had told him about the Wall troubled him. So did the things Dany had shared about Asshai on the other side of the world, but the Wall still stood and Arya was ill, Sansa dying.

As they enter the wormwalks, he tells Edd over his shoulder, “I’ll return.” He would handle matters at Winterfell and then return to the Wall.

“Aye,” Edd snorts, glumly, behind him. “But what will you find when you do?”

He pauses, turning to place his hands on the man’s shoulders. 

“You,” Jon tells him. “Commanding the Night’s Watch.”

He starts to move his legs again, pushing his hair out of his eyes, Edd following, as they walk in a column along a tunnel that connects the Lord Commander’s towers to the practice yard.

“You’re not a maester!”

Jon groans. Pyp has joined them. “You shouldn’t even be going,” he says, anger and concern lacing his words.

He would laugh at his friend’s boldness if this situation weren’t dire, but instead he stops his feet once they reach the entrance to the yard, turning, finding Gendry has joined them too, yet it’s Edd who speaks. 

“The last time you went running after Arya Stark I was named Lord Commander.” He sounds miserable.  “What shit are you about to get us all into, Snow?”

***

Arya winces. Her head is pounding.

She tries to open her eyes, but promptly shuts them when the glare from the sun sneaks past her lids, making her head throb even more. She makes to move, placing her hands on the bed to sit up, but her tailbone screams from the motion as she groans, cursing in a mix of pain and frustration. 

She feels a weight on the featherbed beside her then as warm hands press her shoulders gently back on to the pillow and from the grip on her skin, she realizes she’s in nothing but a tunic. 

“Lie back, Arya,” she hears a voice say and she thinks she must be in a fever dream because she could swear to all the gods that the voice belongs to Jon Snow. 

She tries to open one eye to confirm it, but the brightness is still too much. 

“What happened?” She asks, but her mouth is dry and her voice comes out as a raspy whisper instead. She clears her throat, trying again. “What happened?” She croaks.

“You fell.”

“Fell?” She asks, absently. That explains her tailbone. 

She feels the bed shift as he leans over her to reach for something.

“Passed out more like, in the hall.” 

Something is balled beneath her head, she realizes and she raises her hands to feel around the back of her skull, pressing three cautious fingers to the point where the pain is radiating from. Judging by the spongy sound she hears the wound is still fresh and beneath the pads of her fingers she feels the unmistakable sensation of oozing tissue. 

She draws her fingers away, cringing as she slits her eyes open, expecting to see blood, and surprised when she sees only the pink skin of her fingertips instead. 

“Sam cleaned it,” he explains and she finally sees him as her eyes adjust to the light. 

He looks like he hasn’t slept in days as he stares at her, hardened somehow, _weathered_ even.

“You look terrible, Jon,” she rasps. 

He grins softly as he weaves his fingers through hers. “Not as terrible as you,” he murmurs, handing her a cup of water. 

She takes a sip and tastes blood in her mouth as she hands the water back and shifts her hips in a bid to sit up, but Jon presses his hands to her shoulders, stopping her. “Easy Arya. You hit your head – _badly_ , to hear Aegon tell it.” 

“You really _aren’t_ a lady.” She turns to her left to find Aegon leaning against the wall in a corner, ankles crossed, staring at his fingers idly. “You’re even awful at fainting, Stark.” 

“Why are you still here,” she hisses in a rasp as she tries to rise again, but she quickly decides Jon may be right. Sitting up is not a good idea. The movement makes her head swim.

She closes her eyes, breathing shallowly in an effort to send the nausea away.

“How badly?” she asks Jon.

His jaw tightens as he clasps one of her hands between his. “You’ve been out for nearly three days.”

Well that explains why he looks so exhausted. 

“When was the last time you slept?”

He frowns. “Sometime before you ended up in this bed. I have some matters to attend to with Sam,” he says as he leans forward, pressing a kiss to her forehead. When he pulls back his face is serious. “Rest and stay in this bed, Arya. Aegon will stay. I’ll return in a few hours.” 

Then it comes back in a rush . . .Sansa, the blizzard . . . 

 _We lose if Sansa survives._  

"Wait." She glances between Jon and then Aegon. “Sansa . . . is she alright?”

Aegon opens his mouth to speak, but Jon cuts him off. “She’s alive.”

She hears it in his words though and as Aegon looks at her she sees it on his face, in his grimace, and she knows then that whatever is tormenting the two of them will soon torment her the moment they share it.

“What’s happened?” She demands, but the words come out weaker than she expects. 

Jon’s eyes are sullen as his jaw ticks. “Sansa . . . she . . .” he trails off, looking at Aegon. 

 “She was poisoned and—” Aegon starts.

“No,” she says, cutting him off, shaking her head vehemently. “I checked . . .” she says, "there were no signs . . ." she murmurs, more to herself than either of them, confused now, trying to sit up again. 

“Tarly and some Lorathi puzzled it out. Some exotic poison . . .” Aegon explains, leveling his eyes on hers, watching her closely as he adds, "Why would a Lorathi know about such things?"

 _Jaqen,_ she thinks, ignoring him, grimacing. _Could he have done this?_

She’ll kill him if he did and if he didn’t she’ll make him help her kill whoever did.

She turns to shift her legs to the edge of the bed, needing answers, rising, but her legs are jelly when he feet touch the floor and her balance wobbly as Jon strides back to her side. 

“You’re not going anywhere,” he tells her as he scoops her up and deposits her unceremoniously back on the bed, holding her shoulders to the mattress.

She grows a scowl then, glancing at Aegon, thinking he’ll take her side here, but he’s preoccupied and bothered, a queer look on his face, his eyes trained on Jon. 

“Sam thinks you must have ingested some of the poison from Sansa’s blood. You’ll barely be able to walk,” she hears Jon say as she snaps her eyes to his then, worried for different reasons now.

“Cat? Is Cat—”

Jon grips her shoulders tighter. “She’s fine, Arya,” he says softly and he sounds tired. 

“They came for her?” she whispers, disbelieving, shaking her head as she suddenly remembers Aegon’s words, the rest of it coming back to her. “They came for Sansa and Gendry too?” 

Jon nods, his mouth a line, saying nothing as he studies her, silent, his eyes still and she can’t look at him when he’s staring at her like this, his eyes filled with disappointment, so she squeezes her eyes closed instead, grateful, at least, that he hasn’t lied and tried to tell her this isn’t her fault because, she knows, it _is_. 

She’s responsible for bringing the madness into their home. She’s to blame for why Cat will no longer have a mother. She’s responsible for her sister’s suffering. 

When she forces her eyes open again, she won’t cry, she won’t, but Jon Snow’s eyes are watching hers and his are troubled, still disappointed, making her throat tight.

And it's only then that she remembers that she’s furious with him.

He must see it on her face because his brows pull in tight as he leans away from her, releasing his grip on her shoulders.

She pushes herself up, her head throbbing, which only raises her anger, but when she speaks the words are quiet and hard. “ _Where_ have you been Jon?” 

He glances at Aegon, confused, who merely shrugs with mild amusement and then back at her, as if she should know the answer to this question by now. “In the south, finding us allies.”

She snorts dryly, crossing her arms. “Sleeping with our allies, you mean.”

He jerks back. “Arya, what are you—” He pauses, his brows somehow furrowing even deeper. “Where did you—” His temper flashes then as he fists his sword hand and snaps his head to Aegon. “What did you tell her?” He commands.

Aegon snorts, crossing his arms. “Not that.” He starts for the door. “Perhaps I should leave—”

“You will stay,” they both growl. 

Jon turns back to Arya, his eyes still. “I have to speak with Sam, but when I return we _will_ discuss this, Arya.” 

He rises then, pausing once he reaches the door, not turning to look at her, and she thinks he means to say something, but he shakes his head, thinking better of it. 

Once he’s gone, Aegon snorts. “I did wonder why you were being so nice to him,” he says, smirking.

She glares at him. “You don’t need to be here,” she tells him after a moment, not bothering to hide her displeasure.

Aegon moves toward her bed. “I thought Lemore was the strangest lady I’d ever met, but no . . .” He pauses to scan her face critically. “It’s definitely you, Stark.”

She stares at him then, her face a question, waiting for him to elaborate. 

Aegon sits on the edge of her bed and meets her gaze. “Have you any idea how many ladies—” He pauses to grow a brazen grin, “ _and_ lords would be tickled to have me at their bed side?”

She’s not amused. “If you’re so alluring then why didn’t he fall for _you_?” 

He gives her a queer look. “Arya, Jon’s not in love with Dany. She’s in love with _him_.” 

“But Gendry said—” 

“Gendry’s an idiot,” he mutters, pushing his silver hair from his eyes. “Jon’s in love, but not with her.”

She groans with frustration. “You told me they’re having an _affair_.”

“No I didn’t,” he snaps, exhaling. “She sent Gendry away thinking it might make Jon more . . . receptive to one. It didn’t.”

She presses her mouth into a line, annoyed with him and with Jon.

She shakes her head, infuriated at Jon, at _her_ , at all of it. “He’s hers now,” she mutters.

He glances at her. “Gendry?”

She shakes her head. “Jon,” she whispers.

Aegon sighs and there’s irritation there, but also apprehension that has her turning to look him.

“What?”

He inclines his head, regarding her strangely, an eyebrow raised. “Arya, I’ve never seen Jon worry over Dany the way he’s worried over you the last few days.”

 _Of course he’s worried,_ she thinks, _for Sansa._

“I’m the reason Sansa is ill,” she whispers, staring at the wall.

Aegon frowns. “He loves you.” 

She grimaces. “He should hate me.” She turns to him. “Will you take me to her?”

He nods. “I’ll sneak you out after Jon returns.”

She smiles sadly. “It _is_ good to see you, Egg,” she tells him quietly.

He shakes his head back and forth vigorously. “I can’t say the same, Stark,” he tells her, smiling. “I may die in this wasteland inside a drafty tower with only _you_ to entertain me.”

She crosses her arms, rolling her eyes, glancing away. “You’re hardly a barrel of laughs.”

He squints at her sideways. “It could be worse. You could be stuck here with _her_.” 

The thought makes her nauseous and the feeling reminds her of Sansa. 

She leans her head back against the pillow, quiet, as she breathes out a heavy sigh.

She doesn’t look at him when she tells him flatly, “My sister is going to die.”

He turns his gaze to the door and to the hall that leads to where Sansa is, grimacing as he replies quietly, bluntly, _“I know.”_

***

She’s seated in a leather chair in the corner the following night, Needle drawn across her knees, waiting for him in the darkness when the ironwood door to his bedchamber finally groans.

He pauses in the doorway, waiting. 

“They sent someone for Gendry,” she says quietly, but there’s ice in the words. “I never spoke his name while I was there. Was it you? Did you tell them?” 

“A girl never learns. A man would not give them this name.” The words are condescending and almost said with a hiss. “A man would not be so foolish as to seek out a House that hunts him as well.”

She rises then, her left hand squeezing the hilt of Needle tight as he enters the room, shutting the door behind him, his eyes never leaving her face.

“Maybe he would . . .” she says, challenging, “given who he’s been sleeping with.” 

He tilts his head, squinting at her, a curious smile on his lips. “A man is not jealous of a boy.” 

He moves toward her then, but she extends her right arm, stopping his feet with the press of her palm to his chest. 

He glances away, sighing tiredly, before his eyes shift back to hers. “A woman and a man seek pleasure from each other, no more, no less.” 

He steps forward then, his chest pressing into her palm as he slowly walks her backward across the room until her shoulder blades press up against the warm granite walls of his chambers.

“But a man knows . . .” he tells her, leaning close to whisper in her ear. “A man hears . . .” She can smell the soap in his hair. “When a woman moans a name . . .” His breath is hot on her lips. “A name that is not _his_.” He abruptly steps back then, creating space between their bodies.

She stares at him, quiet for a breath, struggling to not bite her lip, as she remembers the night she moaned Gendry’s name. It had happened only once and she’d hoped Jaqen hadn’t heard. 

“It doesn’t seem to bother you,” she finally says. 

“A man knows it’s another who a woman truly desires.” He shrugs. “A man desires another as well.” He pauses then, inclining his head, regarding her, his face a mask and she feels vulnerable under his scrutiny as he adds, “though a woman does not seem to know who that man is . . .” 

She studies him then. “You can’t have the one you desire,” she states plainly. 

His mouth is tight as he nods. 

“The poison . . .” she says then, speaking of Sansa and he’s watching her closely as she says, “Sam told me you were the one who recognized it.” 

He nods curtly. “Widow’s bite. A toxin. The mark on the breast was a bite.” 

“And the assassin who—” 

“A man has not found the one who did this thing.” He steps closer. “A woman must be careful.” 

She nods, swallowing as she pushes off the wall, closing the distance between them.

“I didn’t come here tonight seeking pleasure from you,” she tells him.

He grows a smile then, one that is sly and pleased, knowing what she intends to do, as he steps aside, and motions with his hands to the door. 

She leads him to the turret where they take what they need, carrying it to the crypts and there, with the dragonglass dagger Jon had given her, she slices her palm open. 

Jaqen takes her wrist then. “A woman cannot undo this thing once done,” he warns.

She inhales, nodding her understanding and then they both watch, mesmerized, as her fisted hand bleeds and the glass candle finally begins to burn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello my lovely readers! You've all been so patient! Apologies for the length between updates. I took a completely unplanned vacation and brought a cold back with me. Next chapter . . . Gendry's back!
> 
> Comments fuel me :)


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